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Gothic novel

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Woodbury University - Elements of the Gothic Novel
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Gothic fiction - Student Encyclopedia (Ages 11 and up)

Gothic novel , European Romantic pseudomedieval fiction having a prevailing atmosphere of mystery and terror. Its heyday was the 1790s, but it underwent frequent revivals in subsequent centuries.

Called Gothic because its imaginative impulse was drawn from medieval buildings and ruins, such novels commonly used such settings as castles or monasteries equipped with subterranean passages, dark battlements, hidden panels, and trapdoors. The vogue was initiated in England by Horace Walpole ’s immensely successful The Castle of Otranto (1765). His most respectable follower was Ann Radcliffe , whose The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) and The Italian (1797) are among the best examples of the genre .

Young woman with glasses reading a book, student

A more sensational type of Gothic romance exploiting horror and violence flourished in Germany and was introduced to England by Matthew Gregory Lewis with The Monk (1796). Other landmarks of Gothic fiction are William Beckford ’s Oriental romance Vathek (1786) and Charles Robert Maturin ’s story of an Irish Faust , Melmoth the Wanderer (1820).

Mary Shelley and the birth of Frankenstein

The classic horror stories Frankenstein (1818), by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley , and Dracula (1897), by Bram Stoker , are in the Gothic tradition but introduce the existential nature of humankind as its definitive mystery and terror.

Easy targets for satire , the early Gothic romances died of their own extravagances of plot , but Gothic atmospheric machinery continued to haunt the fiction of such major writers as Charlotte , Anne , and Emily Brontë , Edgar Allan Poe , Nathaniel Hawthorne , and even Charles Dickens in Bleak House and Great Expectations . In the second half of the 20th century, the term was applied to paperback romances having the same kind of themes and trappings similar to the originals.

A Summary and Analysis of Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘The Tell-Tale Heart’

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

‘The Tell-Tale Heart’ is a Gothic novel in miniature. All of the elements of the Gothic novel are here: the subterranean secret, the Gothic space (scaled down from a full-blown castle to a single room), the gruesome crime – even the hovering between the supernatural and the psychological.

In just five pages, it’s as if Edgar Allan Poe has scaled down the eighteenth-century Gothic novel into a story of just a few thousand words. But what makes this story so unsettling?

Closer analysis reveals that ‘The Tell-Tale Heart’ centres on that most troubling of things: the motiveless murder.

First, a brief summary of ‘The Tell-Tale Heart’. An unnamed narrator confesses that he has murdered an old man, apparently because of the old man’s ‘Evil Eye’ which drove the narrator to kill him. He then describes how he crept into the old man’s bedroom while he slept and stabbed him, dragging the corpse away and dismembering it, so as to conceal his crime.

He goes to some lengths to cover up all trace of the murder – he even caught his victim’s blood in a tub, so that none was spilt anywhere – and then he takes up three of the floorboards of the chamber, and conceals his victim’s body underneath. But no sooner has he concealed the body than there’s a knock at the door: it’s the police, having been called out by a neighbour who heard a shriek during the night.

The narrator lets the police officers in to search the premises, and tells them a lie about the old man being away in the country. He keeps his calm while showing them around, until they go and sit down in the room below which the victim’s body is concealed.

The narrator and the police officers talk, but gradually the narrator begins to hear a ringing in his ears, a noise that becomes louder and more insistent. He believes that it is the beating of the dead man’s heart, taunting him from beyond the grave. Eventually, he can’t stand it any more, and tells the police to tear up the floorboards, the sound of the old man’s beating heart driving him to confess his crime.

The narrator of ‘The Tell-Tale Heart’ is clearly unstable, as the end of the story reveals, but his mental state is questionable right from the start, as the jerky syntax of his narrative suggests:

True! – nervous – very, very dreadfully nervous I had been and am; but why will you say that I am mad? The disease had sharpened my senses – not destroyed – not dulled them. Above all was the sense of hearing acute. I heard all things in the heaven and in the earth. I heard many things in hell. How, then, am I mad? Hearken! and observe how healthily – how calmly I can tell you the whole story.

The multiple dashes, the unusual syntactical arrangement, the exclamation and question marks: all suggest someone who is, at the very least, excitable. His repeated protestations that he is sane and merely subject to ‘over acuteness of the senses’ don’t fully convince: there is too much in his manner (to say nothing of his baseless murder of the old man) to suggest otherwise.

A motiveless crime?

And indeed, what makes ‘The Tell-Tale Heart’ especially chilling – and here we might draw a parallel with another of Poe’s best-known tales, ‘The Black Cat’ – is that the killer freely confesses that his murder of the old man was a motiveless crime:

I loved the old man. He had never wronged me. He had never given me insult. For his gold I had no desire. I think it was his eye! yes, it was this! He had the eye of a vulture – a pale blue eye, with a film over it. Whenever it fell upon me, my blood ran cold; and so by degrees – very gradually – I made up my mind to take the life of the old man, and thus rid myself of the eye forever.

Murder is never justified, but it is sometimes understandable when a person has been driven to extremes and isn’t thinking clearly. But Poe’s narrator didn’t even kill the old man for something as cynical as financial gain. Even his proffered motive – the old man’s ‘Evil Eye’ – is weak. He has to convince himself that that was why he did it, after the fact : ‘I think it was his eye! yes, it was this!’ (our emphasis).

One can imagine a police detective doing a double-take in the interview room. ‘You think it was his eye?’ This alone makes it clear that we are dealing with an unhinged mind, somebody who, to borrow from Bob Dylan, ‘killed for no reason’. Motiveless murderers are often the most unsettling.

Consider the ‘motiveless malignity’ of Iago , perhaps Shakespeare’s finest villain, who offers a number of potential motives for wanting to destroy the lives of Othello and Desdemona, and in doing so reveals that he very probably doesn’t have a real motive – other than wishing to cause trouble for the hell of it.

Poe and Macbeth

But Othello is not Poe’s main Shakespearean intertext for ‘The Tell-Tale Heart’. Closer analysis of the story reveals that an important precursor-text to ‘The Tell-Tale Heart’, and probable influence on Poe, is William Shakespeare’s Macbeth .

Both texts centre on the murder of an ‘old man’; in both cases, the murderer is driven to feel guilt over his crime by being ‘haunted’ by his victim from beyond the grave (Banquo’s ghost in Macbeth , the old man’s beating heart in Poe’s story); both Macbeth and Poe’s narrator show signs of being at least a little mentally unstable; in both texts, the murder of the victim is followed by a knocking at the door.

But what makes Poe’s tale especially effective is the way he employs doubling to suggest that it is perfectly natural that the narrator should be paranoid about the sound coming from the floorboards. For before he had murdered the old man, the narrator had imagined his victim ‘trying to comfort himself’ when he heard a noise outside his bedroom:

All in vain; because Death, in approaching him had stalked with his black shadow before him, and enveloped the victim.

But of course this is really the narrator projecting his own unease around sounds; and it thus foreshadows his later paranoia over the supposed sound coming from under the floorboards – the sound that will drive him to confess to his crime.

But along with the ‘motiveless’ nature of the narrator’s crime, the other aspect of ‘The Tell-Tale Heart’ which makes it such a powerful analysis of the nature of crime and guilt is the slight ambiguity hovering over that sound which taunts the narrator at the end of the story.

An ambiguous tale

It seems most likely that the sound exists only in his head, since the policemen are apparently oblivious to it as they continue to chat away calmly to the narrator. (This is the one real weak point in Poe’s story: once they’ve searched the premises they appear to hang around to make small talk with the narrator. Haven’t they got more important things to do? Unless the narrator isn’t as calm at this point as he believes, and they suspect foul play and are trying to get him to reveal something incriminating…)

But we cannot be entirely sure. Even if the sound is supernatural in origin – and Poe was obviously a master of the supernatural, as several of his other best stories attest – it may be that his victim is making his ghostly heartbeat heard only to the narrator, burrowing away deep within his mind.

But on balance we’re tempted to think that Poe, along with Dickens around the same time (compare the studied analysis of the murderer Jonas Chuzzlewit’s mind as he flees the scene), is pioneering a new kind of approach to the ‘ghost story’ here – one in which the ‘ghost’ is no more than a hallucination or phantom of the character’s mind.

Although such ambiguity had been used to good effect by Shakespeare, in the ghost story it is Poe, in such stories as ‘The Tell-Tale Heart’, who used this ambiguous plot detail to offer a deeper, more unsettling analysis of the nature of conscience.

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6 thoughts on “A Summary and Analysis of Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘The Tell-Tale Heart’”

Wonderful article! When I studied Poe in college my premise for one of my best papers centered on whether or not the murderer was sane or insane and even used “Methinks he protests too much” at the end. I believe I could’ve written several papers on this short story alone with several different topics. Again, wonderful article.

Thank you! Good Hamlet allusion too – one of the triumphs of Poe’s story, I think, is the instability of his narrator. Glad you enjoyed our analysis :)

Ahhhhh…and now here you have brought forth one of my most beloved tale tellers. Poe has influenced not only my own tales but my early life as well. Terrific analysis! The ambiguous nature of the conscience brought to fever pitch. :)

Thank you! It’s one of the real gems among Poe’s tales – and as you say, he’s a great tale-teller so there are quite a few to choose from :)

I’ve wondered if the heartbeat was the narrator’s own, since he was in a state of agitation and excitement while talking to the policemen. In any case, it’s a great story, and this is an interesting analysis.

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Literary Theory and Criticism

Home › Literature › Gothic Novels and Novelists

Gothic Novels and Novelists

By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on March 11, 2019 • ( 6 )

The gothic novel is a living tradition, a form that enjoys great popular appeal while provoking harsh critical judgments. It began with Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1765), then traveled through Ann Radcliffe, Matthew Gregory Lewis, Charles Robert Maturin, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Edgar Allan Poe, Charlotte Brontë and Emily Brontë, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Charles Brockden Brown, Bram Stoker, Charles Dickens, Thomas Hardy, Henry James, and many others into the twentieth century, where it surfaced, much altered and yet spiritually continuous, in the work of writers such as William Faulkner, D. H. Lawrence, Iris Murdoch, John Gardner (1933-1982), Joyce Carol Oates, and Doris Lessing and in the popular genres of horror fiction and some women’s romances.

The externals of the gothic, especially early in its history, are characterized by sublime but terrifying mountain scenery; bandits and outlaws; ruined, ancient seats of power; morbid death imagery; and virgins and charismatic villains, as well as hyperbolic physical states of agitation and lurid images of physical degradation. Its spirit is characterized by a tone of high agitation and unresolved or almost-impossible-to-resolve anxiety, fear, unnatural elation, and desperation.

The first gothic novel is identifiable with a precision unusual in genre study. Walpole (1717-1797), the earl of Orford, began writing The Castle of Otranto in June, 1764,; he finished it in August and published it in an edition of five hundred copies in early 1765. Walpole was a historian and essayist whose vivid and massive personal correspondence remains essential reading for the eighteenth century background. Before writing The Castle of Otranto , his only connection with the gothic was his estate in Twickenham, which he called Strawberry Hill. It was built in the gothic style and set an architectural trend, as his novel would later set a literary trend.

Walpole did not dream of what he was about to initiate with The Castle of Otranto ; he published his first edition anonymously, revealing his identity, only after the novel’s great success, in his second edition of April, 1765. At that point, he no longer feared mockery of his tale of a statue with a bleeding nose and mammoth, peregrinating armor, and an ancient castle complete with ancient family curse. With his second edition, he was obliged to add a preface explaining why he had hidden behind the guise of a preface proclaiming the book to be a “found manuscript,” printed originally “in Naples in the black letter in 1529.” The reader of the first edition was told that The Castle of Otranto was the long-lost history of an ancient Catholic family in the north of England. The greater reading public loved it, and it was reprinted in many editions. By 1796, it had been translated into French and Spanish and had been repeatedly rendered into dramatic form. In 1848, the novel was still active as the basis for successful theatrical presentations, although the original gothic vogue had passed.

Close upon Walpole’s heels followed Radcliffe, Lewis, and Maturin. These three authors, of course, were not the only imitators ready to take advantage of the contemporary trend (there were literally hundreds of those), but they are among the few who are still read, for they made their own distinctive contributions to the genre’s evolution. Radcliffe (1764-1823) was born just as Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto was being published. She was reared in a middle-class milieu, acquainted with merchants and professionals; her husband was the editor of The English Chronicle and a fellow of the Society of Antiquaries. She lived a quiet life, was likely asthmatic, and seems to have stayed close to her hearth. Although she never became a habitué of literary circles and in her lifetime only published a handful of works, she is considered the grande dame of the gothic novelists and enjoyed a stunning commercial success in her day; she is the only female novelist of the period whose work is still read.

Radcliffe’s works include The Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne (1789), A Sicilian Romance (1790), The Romance of the Forest (1791), The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), The Italian: Or, The Confessional of the Black Penitents (1797), and Gaston de Blondeville (1826). She also wrote an account of a trip through parts of northern Europe, A Journey Made in the Summer of 1794 Through Holland and the Western Frontier of Germany (1795). Her remarkably sedate life contrasts strikingly with the melodramatic flamboyance of her works. Her experiences also fail to account for her dazzling, fictional accounts of the scenery of Southern Europe, which she had never seen.

Lewis, called Monk Lewis in honor of his major work, conformed in his life more closely to the stereotype of the gothic masters. Lewis (1775-1818) was a child of the upper classes, the spoiled son of a frivolous beauty, whom he adored. His parents’ unhappy marriage ended when he was at Westminster Preparatory School. There was a continual struggle between his parents to manage his life—his father stern and aloof, his mother extravagant and possessive.

Lewis spent his childhood treading the halls of large, old manses belonging both to family and to friends. He paced long, gloomy corridors—a staple of the gothic— and peered up at ancient portraits in dark galleries, another permanent fixture in gothic convention. Deeply involved with the literati of his day, Lewis (also homosexual) found an equivocal public reception, but his novel The Monk: A Romance (1796; also known as Ambrosio: Or, The Monk ), an international sensation, had an enormous effect on the gothic productions of his day. Lewis died on board ship, a casualty of a yellowfever epidemic, in the arms of his valet, Baptista, and was buried at sea.

Lewis’s bibliography is as frenetic as his biography. Although his only gothic novel is the infamous The Monk , he spent most of his career writing plays heavily influenced by gothic conventions; he also translated many gothic works into English and wrote scandalous poetry. Among his plays are Village Virtues (pb. 1796), The Castle Spectre (pr. 1797), The East Indian (pr. 1799), Adelmorn the Outlaw (pr., pb. 1801), and The Captive (pr. 1803). He translated Friedrich Schiller’s The Minister (1797) and August von Kotzebue’s Rolla: Or, The Peruvian Hero (1799). He became notorious for his poetic work The Love of Gain: A Poem Initiated from Juvenal (1799), an imitation of Juvenal’s thirteenth satire.

Maturin (1780-1824) is the final major gothic artist of the period. He was a Protestant clergyman from Dublin and a spiritual brother of the Marquis de Sade. He also was a protégé of Sir Walter Scott and an admirer of Lord Byron. His major gothic novel is Melmoth the Wanderer (1820), as shocking to its public as was Lewis’s The Monk . An earlier Maturin gothic was Fatal Revenge: Or, The Family of Montorio (1807). His other works include the novel The Milesian Chief (1812); a theological novel, Women: Or, Pour et Contre (1818); a tragedy, Bertram: Or, The Castle of St. Aldobrand (pr., pb. 1816), produced by Edmund Kean; and the novel The Albigenses (1824).

Among the legions of other gothic novelists, a few writers (especially the following women, who are no longer generally read) have made a place for themselves in literary history. These writers include Harriet Lee, known for The Canterbury Tales (1797-1805), written with her sister, Sophia Lee, author also of The Recess: Or, A Tale of Other Times (1783); Clara Reeve ( The Champion of Virtue: A Gothic Story , 1777; also known as The Old English Baron: A Gothic Story ); Regina Maria Roche ( The Children of the Abbey , 1796); Charlotte Smith ( Emmeline: Or, The Orphan of the Castle—A Novel , 1788); Charlotte Dacre ( Zofloya: Or, The Moor— A Romance of the Fifteenth Century , 1806); and Mary Anne Radcliffe ( Manfroné: Or, The One Handed Monk— A Romance , 1809).

Critics generally agree that the period gothics, while having much in common, divide into relatively clear subclassifications: the historical gothic, the school of terror, and the Schauer-Romantik school of horror. All gothics of the period return to the past, are flushed with suggestions of the supernatural, and tend to be set amid ruined architecture, particularly a great estate house gone to ruin or a decaying abbey. All make use of stock characters. These will generally include one or more young and innocent virgins of both sexes; monks and nuns, particularly of sinister aspect; and towering male and female characters of overpowering will whose charismatic egotism knows no bounds.

Frequently the novels are set in the rugged mountains of Italy and contain an evil Italian character. Tumultuous weather often accompanies tumultuous passions. The gothic genre specializes in making external conditions metaphors of human emotions, a convention thought to have been derived in part from the works of William Shakespeare. Brigands are frequently employed in the plot, and most gothics of the period employ morbid, lurid imagery, such as a body riddled with worms behind a moldy black veil.

The various subdivisions of the gothic may feature any or all of these conventions, being distinguished by relative emphasis. The historical gothic, for example, reveals the supernatural against a genuinely historical background, best exemplified by the works of the Lee sisters, who, although their own novels are infrequently read today, played a part in the evolution of the historical novel through their influence on Sir Walter Scott. The school of terror provided safe emotional titillation— safe, because the morbidity such novels portray takes place not in a genuine, historical setting, but in some fantasy of the past, and because the fearful effects tend to be explained away rationally at the end of the respective work. Radcliffe is the major paradigm of this subgroup. The Schauer-Romantik school of horror, best represented by Lewis and Maturin, did not offer the reassurance of a moral, rational order. These works tend to evoke history but stir anxiety without resolving or relieving it. They are perverse and sadistic, marked by the amoral use of thrill.

There are very few traditional gothic plots and conventions; a discrete set of such paradigms was recycled and refurbished many times. Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto, Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho, Lewis’s The Monk, and Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer represent the basic models of the genre.

Castle of Otranto

The Castle of Otranto , emphatically not historical gothic, takes place in a fantasy past. It is not of the school of terror either; although it resolves its dilemmas in a human fashion, it does not rationally explain the supernatural events it recounts. This earliest of the gothics trembles between horror and terror.

The story opens with Manfred, Prince of Otranto, ready to marry his sickly son, Conrad, to the beautiful Isabella. Manfred, the pattern for future gothic villains of towering egotism and pride, is startled when his son is killed in a bizarre fashion. The gigantic statuary helmet of a marble figure of Alphonse the Good has been mysteriously transported to Manfred’s castle, where it has fallen on and crushed Conrad.

Manfred precipitously reveals that he is tired of his virtuous wife, Hippolita, and, disdaining both her and their virtuous daughter, Mathilda, attempts to force himself on the exquisite, virginal Isabella, his erstwhile daughter-in-law elect. At the same time, he attempts to blame his son’s death on an individual named Theodore, who appears to be a virtuous peasant lad and bears an uncanny resemblance to the now helmetless statue of Alfonso the Good. Theodore is incarcerated in the palace but manages to escape. Theodore and Isabella, both traversing the mazelike halls of Otranto to escape Manfred, find each other, and Theodore manages to set Isabella free. She finds asylum in the Church of St. Nicholas, site of the statue of Alfonso the Good, under the protection of Father Jerome, a virtuous friar. In the process of persuading Jerome to bring Isabella to him, Manfred discovers that Theodore is actually Jerome’s long-lost son. Manfred threatens Theodore in order to maneuver Jerome into delivering Isabella. The long-lost relative later became a popular feature of the gothic.

Both Isabella and Theodore are temporarily saved by the appearance of a mysterious Black Knight, who turns out to be Isabella’s father and joins the forces against Manfred. A round of comings and goings through tunnels, hallways, and churches ensues. This flight through dark corridors also became almost mandatory in gothic fiction. In the course of his flight, Theodore falls in love with Mathilda. As the two lovers meet in a church, Manfred, “flushed with love and wine,” mistakes Mathilda for Isabella. Wishing to prevent Theodore from possessing the woman he thinks is his own beloved, Manfred mistakenly stabs his daughter. Her dying words prevent Theodore from revenging her: “Stop thy impious hand . . . it is my father!”

Manfred must now forfeit his kingdom for his bloody deed. The final revelation is that Theodore is actually the true Prince of Otranto, the direct descendant of Alfonso the Good. The statuary helmet flies back to the statue; Isabella is given to Theodore in marriage, but only after he completes a period of mourning for Mathilda; and order is restored. The flight of the helmet remains beyond the pale of reason, as does the extraordinary, rigid virtue of the sympathetic characters, but Manfred’s threat to the kingdom is ended. Here is the master plot for the gothic of the Kingdom

The Mysteries of Udolpho

Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho presents apparently unnatural behavior and events but ultimately explains them all. Not only will the sins of the past be nullified, but also human understanding will penetrate all the mysteries. In The Mysteries of Udolpho , the obligatory gothic virgin is Emily St. Aubert; she is complemented by a virginal male named Valancourt, whom Emily meets while still in the bosom of her family. When her parents die, she is left at the mercy of her uncle, the villainous Montoni, dark, compelling, and savage in pursuit of his own interests. Montoni whisks Emily away to Udolpho, his great house in the Apennines, where, desperate for money, he exerts himself on Emily in hopes of taking her patrimony while his more lustful, equally brutal friends scheme against her virtue. Emily resists, fainting and palpitating frequently. Emily’s propensity to swoon is very much entrenched in the character of the gothic heroine.

Emily soon escapes and, sequestered in a convent, makes the acquaintance of a dying nun, whose past is revealed to contain a murder inspired by lust and greed. Her past also contains Montoni, who acquired Udolpho through her evil deeds. Now repenting, the nun (née Laurentini de Udolpho) reveals all. The innocent victim of Laurentini’s stratagems was Emily’s long-lost, virtuous aunt, and Udolpho should have been hers. Ultimately, it will belong to Emily and Valancourt.

Radcliffe was known to distinguish between horror and terror and would have none of the former. Terror was a blood-tingling experience of which she approved because it would ultimately yield to better things. Horror she identified with decadence, a distemper in the blood that could not be discharged but rendered men and women inactive with fright. Lewis’s The Monk demonstrates Radcliffe’s distinction.

Lewis’s The Monk concerns a Capuchin friar named Ambrosio, famed throughout Madrid for his beauty and virtue. He is fervent in his devotion to his calling and is wholly enchanted by a picture of the Virgin, to which he prays. A young novice of the order named Rosario becomes Ambrosio’s favorite. Rosario is a beautiful, virtuous youth, as Ambrosio thinks, but one night Ambrosio perceives that Rosario has a female breast, and that “he” is in fact “she”: Mathilda, a daughter of a noble house, so enthralled by Ambrosio that she has disguised herself to be near him.

Mathilda is the very image of the picture of the Virgin to which Ambrosio is so devoted, and, through her virginal beauty, seduces Ambrosio into a degrading sexual entanglement that is fully described. As Mathilda grows more obsessed with Ambrosio, his ardor cools. To secure him to her, she offers help in seducing Antonia, another virginal beauty, Ambrosio’s newest passion. Mathilda, the madonna-faced enchantress, now reveals that she is actually a female demon. She puts her supernatural powers at Ambrosio’s disposal, and together they successfully abduct Antonia, although only after killing Antonia’s mother. Ambrosio then rapes Antonia in the foul, suffocating stench of a charnel house in the cathedral catacombs. In this scene of heavy breathing and sadism, the monk is incited to his deed by the virginal Antonia’s softness and her pleas for her virtue. Each tear excites him further into a frenzy, which he climaxes by strangling the girl.

Ambrosio’s deeds are discovered, and he is tried by an inquisitorial panel. Mathilda reveals his union with Satan through her. The novel ends with Satan’s liberation of Ambrosio from the dungeon into which the inquisitors have thrown him. Satan mangles Ambrosio’s body by throwing him into an abyss but does not let him die for seven days (the de-creation of the world?). During this time, Ambrosio must suffer the physical and psychological torments of his situation, and the reader along with him. The devil triumphs at the end of this novel. All means of redressing virtue are abandoned, and the reader is left in the abyss with Ambrosio.

Melmoth the Wanderer

The same may be said of Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer , a tale of agony and the failure of redemption. The book may be called a novel only if one employs the concept of the picaresque in its broadest sense. It is a collection of short stories, each centering on Melmoth, a damned, Faust-like character. Each tale concerns Melmoth’s attempt to find someone to change places with him, a trade he would gladly make, as he has sold his soul to the devil and now wishes to be released.

The book rubs the reader’s nerves raw with obsessive suffering, detailing scenes from the Spanish Inquisition that include the popping of bones and the melting of eyeballs. The book also minutely details the degradation of a beautiful, virginal island maiden named Immalee, who is utterly destroyed by the idolatrous love of Melmoth. The last scene of the book ticks the seconds of the clock as Melmoth, unable to find a surrogate, awaits his fall into Satan’s clutches. The denouement is an almost unbearable agony that the reader is forced to endure with the protagonist. Again the horror is eternal. There will never be any quietus for either Ambrosio or Melmoth, or for the reader haunted by them. These are the molds for the gothic of damnation.

The Modernization of the Gothic

The reading public of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries was avid for both horror and terror, as well as for supernatural history. Such works were gobbled greedily as they rolled off the presses. Indeed, the readers of the gothic may have begun the mass marketing of literature by ensuring the fortunes of the private lending libraries that opened in response to the gothic binge. Although the libraries continued after the gothic wave had crested, it was this craze that gave the libraries their impetus. Such private lending libraries purchased numerous copies of long lists of gothic works and furnished subscribers with a list from which they might choose. Like contemporary book clubs, the libraries vied for the most appetizing authors. Unlike the modern clubs, books circulated back and forth, not to be kept by subscribers.

William Lane’s Minerva Public Library was the most famous and most successful of all these libraries. Lane went after the works of independent gothic authors but formed the basis of his list by maintaining his own stable of hacks. The names of most of the “stable authors” are gone, and so are their books, but the titles linger on in the library records, echoing one another and the titles of the more prominent authors: The Romance Castle (1791), The Black Forest: Or, The Cavern of Horrors (1802), The Mysterious Omen: Or, Awful Retribution (1812).

By the time Melmoth the Wanderer had appeared, this trend had run its course. Only hacks continued to mine the old pits for monks, nuns, fainting innocents, Apennine banditti, and Satanic quests, but critics agree that if the conventions of the gothic period from Walpole to Maturin have dried out and fossilized, the spirit is very much alive. Many modern novels set miles from an abbey and containing not one shrieking, orphaned virgin or worm-ridden corpse may be considered gothic. If the sophisticated cannot repress a snicker at the obvious and well-worn gothic conventions, they cannot dismiss the power and attraction of its spirit, which lives today in serious literature.

Modern thinking about gothic literature has gravitated toward the psychological aspects of the gothic. The castle or ruined abbey has become the interior of the mind, racked with anxiety and unbridled surges of emotion, melodramatically governed by polarities. The traditional gothic is now identified as the beginning of neurotic literature. In a perceptive study of the genre, Love, Misery, and Mystery: Feeling in Gothic Fiction (1978), Coral Ann Howells points out that the gothic literature of the eighteenth century was willing to deal with the syntax of hysteria, which the more prestigious literature, controlled by classical influences, simply denied or avoided. Hysteria is no stranger to all kinds of literature, but thinking today seeks to discriminate between the literary presentation of hysteria or neuroticism as an aberration from a rational norm and the gothic presentation of neuroticism as equally normative with rational control, or even as the dominant mode.

The evolution of the modern gothic began close to the original seedbed, in the works of Edgar Allan Poe. In “The Fall of the House of Usher,” for example, the traditional sins of the gothic past cavort in a mansion of ancient and noble lineage. A young virgin is subjected to the tortures of the charnel house; the tomb and the catacombs descend directly from Lewis. So, too, do the hyperbolic physical states of pallor and sensory excitement. This tale is also marked, however, by the new relationship it seeks to demonstrate between reason and hysterical anxiety.

Roderick Usher’s boyhood friend, the story’s narrator, is a representative of the normative rational world. He is forced to encounter a reality in which anxiety and dread are the norm and in which the passions know no rational bounds. Reason is forced to confront the reality of hysteria, its horror, terror, and power. This new psychological development of the gothic is stripped of the traditional gothic appurtenances in Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart,” where there are neither swooning virgins nor charnel houses, nor ruined, once-great edifices, save the ruin of the narrator’s mind. The narrator’s uncontrollable obsessions both to murder and to confess are presented to stun the reader with the overwhelming force of anxiety unconditioned by rational analysis.

Thus, a more modern gothic focuses on the overturning of rational limits as the source of horror and dread, without necessarily using the conventional apparatus. More examples of what may be considered modern gothic can be found in the works of Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864). Although Hawthorne was perfectly capable of using the conventional machinery of the gothic, as in The House of the Seven Gables (1851), he was one of the architects of the modern gothic. In Hawthorne’s forward-looking tales, certain combinations of personalities bond, as if they were chemical compounds, to form anxiety systems that cannot be resolved except by the destruction of all or part of the human configuration. In The Scarlet Letter (1850), for example, the configuration of Hester, Chillingsworth, and Dimmesdale forms an interlocking system of emotional destruction that is its own Otranto. The needs and social positions of each character in this trio impinge on one another in ways that disintegrate “normal” considerations of loyalty, courage, sympathy, consideration, and judgment. Hester’s vivacity is answered in Dimmesdale, whose violently clashing aloofness and responsiveness create for her a vicious cycle of fulfillment and rejection. Chillingsworth introduces further complications through another vicious cycle of confidence and betrayal. These are the catacombs of the modern gothic.

Another strand of the modern gothic can be traced to Frankenstein (1818), by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (1979-1851). The novel was published just as the gothic genre was on the wane. Shelley’s story represents an important alternative for the gothic imagination. The setting in this work shifts from the castle to the laboratory, forming the gothic tributary of science fiction. Frankenstein reverses the anxiety system of the gothic from the past to the future. Instead of the sins of the fathers—old actions, old human instincts rising to blight the present—human creativity is called into question as the blight of the future. Frankenstein’s mind and laboratory are the gothic locus of “future fear,” a horror of the dark side of originality and birth, which may, as the story shows, be locked into a vicious cycle with death and sterility. A dread of the whole future of human endeavor pursues the reader in and out of the dark corridors of Frankenstein .

Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) may be considered an example of a further evolution of the gothic. Here one finds a strong resurgence of the traditional gothic: the ruined castle, bandits ranging over craggy hills, the sins of the past attacking the life of the present, and swooning, morbidly detailed accounts of deaths. The attendant supernatural horror and the bloodletting of the vampires, their repulsive stench, and the unearthly attractiveness of Dracula’s vampire brides come right out of the original school of Schauer-Romantik horror. The utterly debilitating effect of the vampire on human will is, however, strong evidence for those critics who see the gothic tradition as an exploration of neurosis.

Stoker synthesizes two major gothic subclassifications in his work, thereby producing an interesting affirmation. Unlike the works of Radcliffe and her terror school, Dracula does not ultimately affirm the power of human reason, for it never explains away the supernatural. On the other hand, Stoker does not invoke his vampires as totally overwhelming forces, as in the horror school. Dracula does not present a fatalistic course of events through which the truth will not win out. Humankind is the agency of its salvation, but only through its affirmation of the power of faith. Reason is indeed powerless before Dracula, but Dr. Van Helsing’s enormous faith and the faith he inspires in others are ultimately sufficient to resolve gothic anxiety, without denying its terrifying power and reality.

The Gothic in the Twentieth Century and Later

Significantly, in the contemporary gothic, reason never achieves the triumph it briefly found through the terror school. Twentieth and twenty-first century gothic tends toward the Schauer-Romantik school of horror. Either it pessimistically portrays an inescapable, mindforged squirrel cage, or it optimistically envisions an apocalyptic release through faith, instinct, or imagination, the nonrational human faculties. For examples of both twentieth century gothic trends, it may be instructive to consider briefly William Faulkner (1897-1962), whose works are frequently listed at the head of what is called the southern gothic tradition, and Doris Lessing (1919 – 2013 ), whose later works took a turn that brought them into the fold of the science-fiction branch of gothic. If there remains any doubt about the respectability of the genre and its writers, it may be noted here that both Faulkner and Lessing are winners of the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Faulkner’s fictions have all the characteristic elements of the southern gothic: the traditional iconography; decaying mansions and graveyards; morbid, deathoriented actions and images; sins of the past; and virgins. The Sound and the Fury (1929) is concerned with the decaying Compson house and family, the implications of past actions, and Quentin’s morbid preoccupation with death and virginity; it features Benjy’s graveyard and important scenes in a cemetery. As I Lay Dying (1930) is structured around a long march to the cemetery with a stinking corpse. Absalom, Absalom! (1936) is full of decaying houses and lurid death scenes and features prominently three strange virgins—Rosa Coldfield, Judith Sutpen, and Clytie—or five if Quentin and Shreve are to be counted. In this work, the past eats the present up alive and the central figure, Thomas Sutpen, is much in the tradition of the charismatic, but boundlessly appropriating, gothic villain.

These cold gothic externals are only superficial images that betray the presence of the steaming psychological modern gothic centers of these works. Like Hawthorne, Faulkner creates interfacing human systems of neurosis whose inextricable coils lock each character into endless anxiety, producing hysteria, obsession, and utter loss of will and freedom. The violence and physical hyperbole in Faulkner reveal the truly gothic dilemmas of the characters, inaccessible to the mediations of active reason. As in Hawthorne, the combinations of characters form the catacombs of an inescapable though invisible castle or charnel house. Through these catacombs Faulkner’s characters run, but they cannot extricate themselves and thus simply revolve in a maze of involuted thought. The Compsons bind one another to tragedy, as do the Sutpens and their spiritual and psychological descendants.

There is, however, an alternative in the modern gothic impulse. In her insightful, imaginative study of the modern evolution of the gothic, Ghosts of the Gothic: Austen, Eliot, and Lawrence (1980), Judith Wilt assigns Lessing a place as the ultimate inheritor of the tradition. Lessing does portray exotic states of anxiety, variously descending into the netherworld ( Briefing for a Descent into Hell , 1971) and plunging into outer space (the Canopus in Argos series), but Wilt focuses on The Four-Gated City (1969). This novel has both the trappings and the spirit of the gothic. The book centers on a doomed old house and an old, traditional family succumbing to the sins of the past. These Lessing portrays as no less than the debilitating sins of Western culture, racist, sexist, and exploitive in character. Lessing does indeed bring down this house. Several of the major characters are released from doom, however, by an apocalyptic World War III that wipes away the old sins, freeing some characters for a new, fruitful, life without anxiety. Significantly, this new world will be structured not on the principles of reason and logic, which Lessing excoriates as the heart of the old sins, but on the basis of something innately nonrational and hard to identify. It is not instinct and not faith, but seems closest to imagination. Lessing’s ultimately hopeful vision, it must be conceded, is not shared by most contemporary practitioners of the genre. The gothic enjoyed a resurgence in the 1980’s that critics identified as a significant literary trend. Typical of the diversity of writers mentioned under this rubric are those represented in a collection edited by Patrick McGrath (born 1950): The New Gothic: A Collection of Contemporary Gothic Fiction (1991; with Bradford Morrow). McGrath, himself a writer of much-praised gothic fictions, assembled work by veteran novelists such as Robert Coover and John Hawkes as well as younger (now established) writers such as Jamaica Kincaid and William T. Vollmann; the group includes both the best-selling novelist Peter Straub and the assaultive experimental novelist Kathy Acker. These works were first collected by McGrath in the journal Conjunctions (1989), in which he contributed an essay outlining some of the characteristics of the new gothic. While resisting any attempt at rigid definition (the gothic, he says, is “an air, a tone, a tendency”; it is “not a monolith”), he acknowledges that all the writers whom he places in this group “concern themselves variously with extremes of sexual experience, with disease and social power, with murder and terror and death.” That much might be said about most gothic novelists from the beginnings of the genre. What perhaps differentiates many of the writers whom McGrath discusses from their predecessors—what makes the new gothic new—is a more self-consciously transgressive stance, evident in McGrath’s summation of the vision that he and his fellow writers share.

Common to all is an idea of evil, transgression of natural and social law, and the gothic, in all its suppleness, is the literature that permits that mad dream to be dreamt in a thousand forms.

Among popular-fiction writers, the gothic split into two main genres, one based on supernatural or psychological horror and the other based on women’s fiction, featuring romance and, often, historical settings. Moreover, combinations of the two traditions most approach the hyperreal intensity and blend of fear and passion seen in the original gothic: for example, the saga of the Dollanganger family by V. C. Andrews (1923-1986) or the Blood Opera series— Dark Dance (1992), Personal Darkness (1993), and Darkness, I (1994)—by Tanith Lee (1947-2015). While horror writers often substitute the suburbs or small town for the isolated castle—and sometimes psychic abilities, deranged computers, or psychotic killers for ghostly nuns and predatory villain-heroes—they continue to explore the intense feeling, perilous world, tense social situations, and alluring but corrupt sexuality of the original gothic. Unlike the romantic gothic, which has seen periods of quiescence and revival, an unbroken line of the horror gothic persisted from The Castle of Otranto through Dracula and into the twentieth century with books such as Ghost Stories of an Antiquary (1904), by M. R. James (1862-1936), and the works of Walter de la Mare (1873-1956) and H. P. Lovecraft (1890-1937). These stories continue the trend—seen in Poe, Hawthorne, Faulkner, and others—of maintaining morbid and sensational gothic elements while rooting the terror in psychology and even epistemology. Often, hauntings reveal, or are even replaced by, obsession and paranoia. Before the burgeoning of the modern commercial horror novel, Shirley Jackson (1916-1965), in two eerie and lyrical novels, The Haunting of Hill House (1959) and We Have Always Lived in the Castle (1962), uses the traditional gothic form and many of its motifs, with both psychological sophistication and true terror. Robert Bloch (1917-1994), with his novel Psycho (1959), also updates and psychologizes gothic conventions, substituting an out-of-the-way motel for a castle and explicitly invoking Sigmund Freud . The horror genre grew with the (arguably) gothic novel The Exorcist (1971), by William Peter Blatty (1928-2017), and with Rosemary’s Baby (1967), by Ira Levin (1929-2007). The novel transplants to a New York City apartment building the hidden secret, supernatural menace, and conspiracies against the heroine of early gothics. Although the horror market withered in the 1990’s, four best-selling authors continued in the gothichorror vein: Dean R. Koontz (born 1945), Straub, Stephen King (born 1947), and Anne Rice (born 1941). While much of Koontz’s horror is better classified as horror-adventure, lacking the brooding neuroses and doubts about rationality prevalent in gothic fiction, gothic aspects do dominate his novels Whispers (1980), Shadowfires (1987), Dean Koontz’s Frankenstein: Prodigal Son (2005; with Kevin J. Anderson), Dean Koontz’s Frankenstein: City of Night (2005; with Edward Gorman), and Dean Koontz’s Frankenstein: Dead or Alive (2007; with Gorman). Koontz’s Demon Seed (1973) exemplifies the techno-gothic: A threatening setting and pursuing lover combine in a robot intelligence, which runs the house and wants to impregnate the heroine. Rice explores the gothic’s lush, dangerous sexuality and burden of the past in the novels of the Vampire Chronicles, including Interview with the Vampire (1976), The Vampire Lestat (1985), The Tale of the Body Thief (1992), Memnoch the Devil (1995), Blood and Gold: Or, The Story of Marius (2001), and Blood Canticle (2003).

Straub’s Julia (1975; also known as Full Circle), is a drawing-room gothic novel, focusing on the haunting— supernatural, mentally pathological, or both—of a woman dominated by her husband and his disturbing, enmeshed family. In Ghost Story (1979), Shadowland (1980), and others, Straub widens the focus, exploring and critiquing the small town, boys’ school, or suburban setting while developing gothic themes, including dangerous secrets, guilt, ambivalent eroticism, and a threat from the past. In Lost Boy, Lost Girl (2003), the threats include a pedophile serial killer, a haunted house, and a missing man’s obsession with his dead mother. Straub explores other genres as well, especially the mystery, but maintains a gothic tone and intensity.

Similarly, King ’s early work is more strictly gothic, such as ’Salem’s Lot (1975), in which vampires spread through a small town in Maine, and The Shining (1977), a story of madness and terror in an isolated, empty hotel. However, many later works, even mimetic ones such as Gerald’s Game (1992), Dolores Claiborne (1993), Bag of Bones (1998), From a Buick Eight (2002), and Cell (2006), continue gothic themes and often a gothic tone. King is the undisputed best-selling author of the genre, having sold more than 330 million copies of his novels. Straub and King, admirers of one another’s work, have collaborated on two fantasy novels, The Talisman (1984), and a sequel, Black House (2001).

The prolific Joyce Carol Oates (born 1938), author of more than fifty novels, has created several memorable gothic works, including a Gothic Saga series comprising Bellefleur (1980) and its sequels. Another memorable work is Zombie (1995), an exploration of the mind of a serial killer, based on the life of Jeffrey Dahmer. New voices on the gothic-novel scene include Donna Tartt (born c. 1964), author of The Secret History (1992) and The Little Friend (2002), and Elizabeth Kostova (born 1964), whose first novel, The Historian (2005), became a best seller and was translated into close to thirty languages.

Along with terror and horror, sentimental and romantic elements were established in the original gothic in the works of Ann Radcliffe, Clara Reeve, Susanna Rowson (1762-1824), and the Brontë sisters. In 1938, Rebecca , by Daphne du Maurier (1907-1989), the story of a young woman’s marriage to a wealthy English widower with a secret, conveyed many gothic conventions to a new audience, paving the way for the genre of gothic romance. Combining mystery, danger, and romantic fantasy, such books tend to feature innocent but admirable heroines, a powerful male love interest and his isolated estate, ominous secrets (often linked to a woman from the love interest’s past, as in Rebecca), and exotic settings that are remote in place and time.

In the early 1960’s, editor Gerald Gross of Ace Books used the term “gothic” for a line of paperbacks aimed at women, featuring primarily British authors such as Victoria Holt (pseudonym for Eleanor Alice Burford Hibbert, 1906-1993), Phyllis A. Whitney (1903-2008), and Dorothy Eden (1912-1982). The mystery and love plots are inextricable, and the novels feature many gothic elements, including besieged heroines; strong, enigmatic men; settings that evoke an atmosphere of tension and justified paranoia; heightened emotional states; doubled characters (including impersonation); and lurid, sometimes cruel, sexuality. In the 1970’s and later, erotic elements flourished and became more explicit, resulting in the new category of the erotic gothic.

Read Vampire Narrative

Vampire Narrative

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Postmodern Gothic

Source : Rollyson, Carl. Critical Survey Of Long Fiction . 4th ed. New Jersey: Salem Press, 2010. Bibliography Brown, Marshall. The Gothic Text. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2005. Ellis, Markman. The History of Gothic Fiction. New York: Columbia University Press, 2000. Frank, Frederick S. Guide to the Gothic. Lanham, Md.: Scarecrow Press, 1984. _______. Guide to the Gothic II. Lanham, Md.: Scarecrow Press, 1995. Geary, Robert F. The Supernatural in Gothic Fiction: Horror, Belief, and Literary Change. Lewiston, N.Y.: Edwin Mellen Press, 1992. Haggerty, George E. Queer Gothic. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006. Jackson, Anna, Karen Coats, and Roderick McGillis, eds. The Gothic in Children’s Literature: Haunting the Borders. New York: Routledge, 2007. Kilgour, Maggie. The Rise of the Gothic Novel. Reprint. New York: Routledge, 1997. Mussell, Kay. Women’s Gothic and Romantic Fiction: A Reference Guide. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1981. Norton, Rictor, ed. Gothic Readings: The First Wave, 1764-1840. Reprint. New York: Leicester University Press, 2006. Punter, David, and Glennis Byron. The Gothic. Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2004. Punter, David, ed. A Companion to the Gothic. Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2000. Varma, Devendra P. The Gothic Flame: Being a History of the Gothic Novel in England—Its Origins, Efflorescence, Disintegration, and Residuary Influences. Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1987. Wright, Angela. Gothic Fiction. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007.

Gothic Novel | Definition, Characteristics, History, Essay, Examples in Literature

Gothic Novel in Literature

Gothic novel definition.

Gothic Novel is a “genre of fiction characterized by mystery and supernatural horror, often set in a dark castle or other medieval setting.” Such novel is pseudo-medieval fiction with a prevailing atmosphere of mystery and terror. Gothic novel is sometimes referred to as Gothic horror. It is a genre or mode of literature that combines elements of both horror and romance .

Gothicism ‘s origin is attributed to English author Horace Walpole, with his 1764 novel The Castle of Otranto , subtitled “A Gothic Story “. The Gothic novel was a branch of the larger Romantic movement that sought to stimulate strong emotions in the reader – fear and apprehension in this case.’ Such novel takes its name from medieval architecture, as it often hearkens back to the medieval era in spirit and subject matter and often uses Gothic buildings as a setting. The effect of Gothic fiction feeds on a pleasing sort of terror. It is an extension of Romantic literary pleasures that were relatively new at the time of Walpole’s novel. Melodrama and parody (including self-parody) are other long-standing features of the Gothic initiated by Walpole.

Historical Background of Gothic

The Goths were one of the many Germanic tribes. They fought numerous battles with the Roman Empire for centuries. According to their own myths, as narrated by Jordanes, a Gothic historian from the mid 6th century, the Goths originated in what is now southern Sweden, but their king Berig led them to the southern shore of the Baltic Sea. Later Goths separated into twongroups, the Visigoths (the West Goths) and Ostrogoths (the East Goths). They were named so because of the place where they finally settled.

They reached the height of their utmost power around 5th century A.D., when they sacked Rome and captured Spain, but their history finally subsumed under that of the countries they conquered (“Goths”). During the Renaissance, Europeans rediscovered Greco-Roman culture. They began to regard a particular type of architecture, mainly those built during the middle Ages, as “gothic.” It was not because of any connection to the Goths, but because the ‘Uomo Universale’ considered these buildings “barbaric” and definitely not in that Classical style. Centuries more passed before “gothic” came to describe a certain type of novels . This was named so because all these novels seem to take place in Gothic-styled architecture which was mainly castles, mansions, and abbeys.

Gothic Novel Characteristics

Setting in a castle or Mansions

An atmosphere of mystery and suspense pervaded by threatening feeling

An ancient and obscure prophecy may be connected with the castle or its inhabitants (either former or present).

Character may have Omens, portents, visions.

Supernatural or otherwise inexplicable and dramatic events may occur.

Characters may have high, even overwrought emotion resulting in crying and emotional speeches.

Female characters are often in distress and are oppressed in order to gain sympathy of the readers.

Women are threatened by a powerful and tyrannical male.

The metonymy of gloom and horror. Metonymy is a subtype of metaphor, in which something (like rain) is used to stand for something else (like sorrow). For example, the film industry likes to use metonymy as a quick shorthand, so we often notice that it is raining in funeral scenes.

A peculiar glossary of the gothic novels for mystery, fear, terror, surprise, haste anger or largeness for creating the atmosphere.

Gothic Novel Examples

Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764) is often regarded as the first true Gothic romance . Walpole was obsessed with medieval Gothic architecture, and built his own house, Strawberry Hill, in that form, sparking a fashion for Gothic revival. A few good examples of Gothic fiction are Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) and The Italian (1797). Matthew Gregory Lewis’s The Monk (1796) was the book that introduced more horrific elements into the English gothic. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstei n (1818) and Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) are fine examples of gothic novels .

Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein as a Gothic Novel

Gothic Novel: An Essay

The Gothic fiction , however, enjoyed its heyday from 1762 to 1820 and influenced and inspired the sensational writers of the late nineteenth century. Certain merits of the Gothic fiction have been recognised by the Freudian psychologists. Herbert Read in his book Surrealism remarks: “It is possible that Monk Lewis, Maturin and Mrs. Radcliffe should relatively to Scott, Dickens and Hardy occupy a much higher rank.” He had defended the Gothic fiction against the objections that the plots of these novels are fictitious, that the characters are unreal and the sentiments that excite are morbid,

“All these judgements merely reflect our prejudices. It is proper for a work of imagination to be fictitious, and for characters to be typical rather than realistic.”

Dr. D. P. Varma in his book “ The Gothic Flame ” observes : “The Gothic novel is a conception as vast and complex as a Gothic Cathedral. One finds in it the same sinister overtone and the same solemn grandeur.” According to Montague Summers ( The Gothic Quest ), Gothic was the essence of romanticism, and romanticism was the literary expression of supernaturalism. As a matter of fact, the Gothic fiction was a profound reaction against the long domination of reason and authority. The Gothic novelists enlarged the sense of reality and its impact on human beings. It acknowledged the nonrational in the world of things and events, occasionally in the realm of transcendental, ultimately and most persistently in the depth of the human being. The application of Freudian psychology to literature has altered our attitude to the Gothic romances. The suppressed neurotic and erotic of educated society are reflected in the Gothic romances.

“The scenes of no in the Gothic fiction may have been the harmless release of that innate sp of cruelty which is present in each of us, an impulse mysterious inextricable connected with the very forces of life and death”

(Prof. Varma)

The Gothic fiction has a resemblance to the Gothic Architecture . The weird and eerie atmosphere of Gothic fiction was derived from the Gothic architecture which evoked feelings of horror, wildness, suspense and gloom. The stimulation of fear and the probing of the mysterious provided the raison d’etre of the Gothic novelists who took an important part in liberating the emotional energies that had been so long restrained by common sense and good form.

A number of influences contributed to the growth of the Gothic novel in the eighteenth century. It developed against the spirit of the Age of Reason and the stern warning of Dr. Johnson. The Gothic novel owes particularly to the picturesque antiquarianism, ruins and graveyard sentiment. Kenneth Clark in The Gothic Revival says : The Gothic novelists were the natural successors to the Graveyard poets. In the 18th century , the ghost stories were wide in circulation and people showed interest in questions of life, death, the occult, magic and astrology. The popularity of Spenser, Shakespeare and Milton intensified people’s belief in the supernatural. The Gothic novelists were inspired by the examples of Italy, France and Germany and by the oriental allegory or moral apologue of the east. Addison’s The Vision of Mirza (1711) and Johnson’s Rasselas (1759) gave some colour to Gothic romance .

Horace Walpole was the pioneer in Gothic fiction. Walpole’s sensitive imagination and dreaming mind absorbed the spirit of romanticism. His antiquarian interests caught the Gothic spirit–the romantic setting the continuous spell of horror, the colour of melancholy, awe and superstition which blossomed in The Castle of Otranto (1764). The Gothic romance is a horror novel in which we have walking skeletons, pictures that move out of their frames and their blood-curdling incidents. The ghostly machinery is often cumbrous but as a return to the romantic elements of mystery and fear, the book is noteworthy. Diana Neill, however, dismisses the book as amusing rather than frightening. Virginia Woolf in an article stated, “Walpole had imagination, taste, style in addition to a passion for the romantic past.” Miss Clara Reeve wrote many Gothic romances, the chief of them being

‘The Old English Baron’. She was the first Gothic novelist to make use of dreams. Miss Clara Reeve, however, lacked vivid imagination. Montague Summers condemns The Old English Baron as a “dull and didactic narrative told in a style of chilling mediocrity.”

Mrs. Ann Radcliffe , the wife of an Oxford graduate has been called “the Shakespeare of Romance writers”. Montague Summers refers to the sombre and sublime genius of Ann Radcliffe. Her romantic temperament, her passion for music and wild scenery, her love of solitude, her interest in the mysterious, her ability to arouse wonder and fear helped her in writing masterpiece in Gothic fiction. During the years 1789-1797, she wrote five romances Castles of Athlian and Dubayne , A Cicelian Romance , The Romance of the Forest , The Mysteries of Udolpho , The Italian Coleridge called The Mystery of Udolpho “the most interesting novel in the English language” . Its noble outline, its majestic and beautiful images harmonizing with the scenes exert an irresistible fascination. It gradually rises from the gentlest beauty towards the terrific and the sublime. Unlike other terror novelists, Mrs. Radcliffe rationalised the supernatural. We hear mysterious voices in the chamber of Udolpho, but we are told that they were the wanton tricks of a prisoner. She employed scenery for their own sake in the novel. Moreover, by her insight into the workings of fear, she contributed to the development of the psychological novel . She adopted the dramatic structure of the novel which influenced the Victorian novelists. Thus her influence percolated through Scott on the 19th century novel in its various aspects-psychological, romantic and structural.

Matthew Gregory Lewis made a spine-chilling and blood-curdling use of magic and necromancy and pointed the grim and ghastly themes in lurid colours. His The Monk absorbed the ghastly and crude supernaturalism of the German Romantic movement in English fiction. It is melodrama epitomised. He indulges in crude supernaturalism rising to a grotesque climax borrowed from Dr. Faustus , when a demon rescues the villain-hero from execution only to fly high in the air with him and drop him to his death cm jagged rocks.

Beckford’s Vathek is wholly a fantasy. Its air of mystery arises from supposedly unnatural causes, while a sense of horror is heightened for artistic effect. Its gorgeous style and stately descriptions, its exaltation of both poetic and moral justice relate it to the Gothic romance,

Charles Robert Maturin wrote a number of nicely constructed Gothic romances : The Fatal Revenge (1807), The Wild Irish Boy (1808). The Mebsian Chief (1872), Melmoth , The Wanderer (1820). Maturin dispensed with the spine-chilling paraphernalia of the Terror School and concentrated his attention on the suggestive and psychological handling of the stories. His acute insight into character, vivid descriptive faculty and sensitive style of writing are in the tradition of Mrs. Radcliffe; but by his unabashed of the supernatural he treads in the footsteps of Lewis. He introduces horror in the novel by the clever Radcliffian device of reticence and suggestion. His Melmoth the Wanderer may be called the swan song of Gothic fiction . After it the fashion gradually died away. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) is a remarkable Gothic novel. She employed the pseudo-scientific technique in depicting horrors in the novel. William Godwin wrote two horror novels Caleb Williams and St. Leon. He neither imitates the suggestive method of Mrs. Radcliffe, nor the gruesome horrors of Gregory Lewis, but he creates physical realistic horrors in his novels.

Gothic Literature in the Romantic Period

In both Gothic and romantic creeds there is a tendency to slip imperceptivity from the real into the other world, to demolish barriers between the physical and the psychic or supernatural. Wordsworth’s Guilt and Sorrow , Peter Bell , Coleridge’s The Ancient Mariner , Kubla Khan , Christabel , Keats’ The Eve of St. Agnes and La Belle Dame Sans Mercy , Shelley’s The Witch of Atlas are some Gothic poems influenced by the technique and devices of the Gothic fiction.

Gothic Literature in the Victorian Period

The Gothic romances have great influence on the Victorian and modern fiction. The sensational novels of Bulwar Lytton, Wilkie Collins in their emphasis on mystery and terror are a direct descent from the Gothic novels. The Bronte sisters luxuriously used the suggestive method of Radcliffe for creating the Gothic atmosphere in Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre . Walter de la Mare’s Poem The Listeners is full of gothic setting.

Gothic Literature in the Modern Period

In modern times, the fantasy of H. G. Wells , and C. S. Lewis, J . K Rowling, Edgar Allan Poe shows us worlds unknown, monstrous and horrible. The modern detective novels of Edgar Wallace and Peter Cheney are influenced by the Gothic romances. They provided a pattern and also inspired the sensational writers of to-day with the incentive that set them on the sinister paths of crime fiction.

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In the most general terms, Gothic literature can be defined as writing that employs dark and picturesque scenery, startling and melodramatic narrative devices, and an overall atmosphere of exoticism, mystery, fear, and dread. Often, a Gothic novel or story will revolve around a large, ancient house that conceals a terrible secret or serves as the refuge of an especially frightening and threatening character.

Despite the fairly common use of this bleak motif, Gothic writers have also used supernatural elements, touches of romance, well-known historical characters, and travel and adventure narratives to entertain their readers. The type is a subgenre of Romantic literature —that's Romantic the period, not romance novels with breathless lovers with wind-swept hair on their paperback covers—and much fiction today stems from it.

Development of Gothic Literature

Gothic literature developed during the Romantic period in Britain. The first mention of "Gothic," as pertaining to literature, was in the subtitle of Horace Walpole's 1765 story "The Castle of Otranto: A Gothic Story" which was supposed to have been meant by the author as a subtle joke—"When he used the word it meant something like ‘barbarous,’ as well as ‘deriving from the Middle Ages ." In the book, it's purported that the story was an ancient one, then recently discovered. But that's just part of the tale.

The supernatural elements in the story, though, launched a whole new genre, which took off in Europe. Then America's Edgar Allen Poe got ahold of it in the mid-1800s and succeeded like no one else. In Gothic literature, he found a place to explore psychological trauma, the evils of man, and mental illness. Any modern-day zombie story, detective story, or Stephen King novel owes a debt to Poe. There may have been successful Gothic writers before and after him, but no one perfected the genre quite like Poe.

Major Gothic Writers

A few of the most influential and popular 18th-century Gothic writers were Horace Walpole ( The Castle of Otranto , 1765), Ann Radcliffe ( Mysteries of Udolpho , 1794), Matthew Lewis ( The Monk , 1796), and Charles Brockden Brown ( Wieland , 1798).

The genre continued to command a large readership well into the 19th century, first as Romantic authors such as Sir Walter Scott ( The Tapestried Chamber , 1829) adopted Gothic conventions, then later as Victorian writers such as Robert Louis Stevenson ( The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde , 1886) and Bram Stoker ( Dracula , 1897) incorporated Gothic motifs in their stories of horror and suspense.

Elements of Gothic fiction are prevalent in several of the acknowledged classics of 19th-century literature, including Mary Shelley 's Frankenstein (1818), Nathaniel Hawthorne's The House of the Seven Gables (1851), Charlotte Brontë 's Jane Eyre (1847), Victor Hugo's The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1831 in French), and many of the tales written by Edgar Allan Poe such as "The Murders in the Rue Morgue” (1841) and "The Tell-Tale Heart" (1843).

Gothic Literature's Influence on Today's Fiction

Today, Gothic literature has been replaced by ghost and horror stories, detective fiction, suspense and thriller novels, and other contemporary forms that emphasize mystery, shock, and sensation. While each of these types is (at least loosely) indebted to Gothic fiction, the Gothic genre was also appropriated and reworked by novelists and poets who, on the whole, cannot be strictly classified as Gothic writers.

In the novel Northanger Abbey , Jane Austen affectionately showcased the misconceptions and immaturities that could be produced by misreading Gothic literature. In experimental narratives such as The Sound and the Fury and Absalom, Absalom! William Faulkner transplanted Gothic preoccupations—threatening mansions, family secrets, doomed romance—to the American South. And in his multigenerational chronicle One Hundred Years of Solitude , Gabriel García Márquez constructs a violent, dreamlike narrative around a family house that takes on a dark life of its own.

Similarities With Gothic Architecture

There are important, though not always consistent, connections between Gothic literature and Gothic architect . Gothic structures, with their abundant carvings, crevices, and shadows, can conjure an aura of mystery and darkness and often served as appropriate settings in Gothic literature for the mood conjured upthere. Gothic writers tended to cultivate those emotional effects in their works, and some of the authors even dabbled in architecture. Horace Walpole also designed a whimsical, castle-like Gothic residence called Strawberry Hill.

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Gothic Literature Essay

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Gothic literature originated in the early nineteenth century. Writers of such works combined some elements of the medieval literature considered too fanciful and modern literature classified as too limited to realism. The settings reflected elements of horror and fear. They consisted of gloomy dungeons, underground passages, abundant usage of ghosts, and mysterious occurrences.

The relations reflected the extreme opposites such as life and death, dream and reality, right and wrong, and rationality and madness. The main aim of gothic literature was to evoke chilling terror by use of cruelty, mystery, and a combination of horror scenes. Gothic literature now includes works of fictions, which do not have medieval settings but create a worrisome atmosphere of terror in representing macabre or melodramatic violence.

Allan Edgar Poe short story, The Pit and the Pendulum, shows horrors associated with torture. Mental and physical torture are horrifying human experiences. The story also shows the cruelty and injustice people experience when they deviate from the established beliefs or when wrongly accused. The choice of settings as “THE PIT, typical of hell………. the Ultima Thule of all their punishments” (Poe 1989), shows the pervading elements of gothic literature.

Words, phrases, and imagery contribute to the effect of terror with morbidity and the expected horrifying death e.g. “Down — certainly, relentlessly down! It vibrated within three inches of my bosom! I struggled violently – furiously” and use of images like “Figures of fiends in aspects of menace, with skeleton forms, and other more really fearful images” (Poe 1989) create terrifying horror scenes.

Poe captures the use of explicit violence as a condemnation of the Inquisition. Poe shows confusion in the narrator’s mind as a “call to mind flatness and dampness; and then all is MADNESS — the madness of a memory which busies itself among forbidden things” (Poe 1989). Readers do not know whether the narrator is guilty or not. Poe leaves the moral judgment to his readers as he shows hope in rescue of the narrator.

The Cask of Amontillado by Poe shows terror as a means of punishing offenders. We do not see any evidence that Fortunato inflicted thousands of injuries and insults to Montresor. The short story demonstrates a human tendency in avenging wrong-doings. He foreshadows death in putting on a mask of black silk.

The concealed murder is a means to avoid the legal procedure for justice. Poe captures elements of death as follow “It was not the cry of a drunken man. There was then a long and obstinate silence. I laid the second tier, and the third, and the fourth; and then I heard the furious vibration of the chain” (Poe 1846).

The description of the setting alludes to scary and horrifying scenes such as “walls had been lined with human remains, piled to the vault overhead” and “I bowed him through several suites of rooms to the archway that led into the vaults. I passed down a long and winding staircase” (Poe 1846). The images of “A huge human foot d’or, in a field azure; the foot crushes a serpent rampant whose fangs are imbedded in the heel” present scary elements of gothic works (Poe 1846). Poe leaves the moral judgment about revenge to the readers.

Poe’s two short stories bear all the elements of horrifying and chilling gothic literature. The use of imagery and descriptions of the settings make the reader identify with the sufferings people go through in the name of seeking justice. In The Pit and the Pendulum, Poe does not prove the evidence of wrongdoings of the narrator.

Likewise, in The Cask of Amontillado , he fails to show us evidence that Fortunato inflicted injuries and insults to Montresor. Poe shows that all forms of retributions, either through a legal system or personal vendetta, are the worst form of horror people can experience. This is a case of blind justice and blind revenge.

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Home — Essay Samples — Literature — Literary Genres — Gothic Literature

Essays on Gothic Literature

Hook examples for gothic literature essays, dark and haunting atmosphere hook.

"In the eerie candlelight of a Gothic castle, shadows dance on the walls, and secrets lurk in the corners. As we step into the realm of Gothic literature, prepare to explore the spine-tingling atmospheres that define this genre."

The Mysterious and Enigmatic Character Hook

"Behind the cloak and veil, Gothic characters conceal layers of mystery and intrigue. Join me as we unravel the complexities of these enigmatic figures and the psychological depths they reveal."

Gothic Horrors and Unseen Terrors Hook

"Beyond the surface of the ordinary lies a world of horrors and terrors that defy explanation. Delve into the supernatural elements and unseen forces that haunt the pages of Gothic literature."

Gothic Settings as Characters Hook

"In Gothic tales, settings possess a life of their own, shaping the narrative and influencing the characters. Explore how Gothic literature transforms landscapes into characters with their own stories to tell."

The Intersection of Romance and Darkness Hook

"Love and passion intertwine with darkness and obsession in Gothic romance. Analyze the complex relationships that fuel the narratives of love and despair."

Victorian Fears and Societal Reflections Hook

"Gothic literature often reflects the fears and anxieties of the Victorian era. Investigate how these tales serve as mirrors to societal concerns and the exploration of forbidden desires."

Gothic Literature's Enduring Influence Hook

"The haunting echoes of Gothic literature continue to resonate in contemporary culture. Join me in tracing the lasting impact of Gothic tales on literature, film, and the macabre."

Strange Dreams

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Isolation in The Gothic Novel: Gender and Genre

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The Natural Order of Things Should not Be Disturbed: Gothic Literature Perspective

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Characteristic Features of Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto

Literary review of the haunting of hill house by shirley jackson, different ways in which different peoople cope with their diferent problems, dracula: representation of gothic tropes in the novel and the film, a synopsis of sir arthur conan doyle’s the hound of the baskervilles (hob, trapped in a cage: jackson’s the haunting of hill house and gilman’s the yellow wallpaper, character analysis: judge jaffrey pyncheon, the cruel castle, comprehensive analysis of the black cat by edgar allan poe, the evils of religion and the dark side of humanity potrayed in a house of doom, the role of setting in the legend of sleepy hollow by washington irving, the evolution of the vampire, a review of the play the legend of sleepy hollow, domestic assault in hawthorne's and melville's story the paradise of bachelors, nathaniel hawthorne’s critique of gender roles in rappaccini’s daughter, the effects of sin and guilt as manifested through descendants of a new england family,, shirley jackson`s the haunting of hill house: feelings of being an outsider and agoraphobia, optism as potrayed in house of seven gables, aristocratic and democratic ideas' struggle as symbolized in the house of the seven gables, the representation of gender and gendered roles in "the monk" by gregory lewis.

Gothic fiction, sometimes called Gothic horror in the 20th century, is a loose literary aesthetic of fear and haunting. The name is a reference to Gothic architecture of the European Middle Ages, which was characteristic of the settings of early Gothic novels.

Gothic literature developed during the Romantic period in Britain. The first mention of "Gothic," as pertaining to literature, was in the subtitle of Horace Walpole's 1765 story "The Castle of Otranto: A Gothic Story" which was supposed to have been meant by the author as a subtle joke. The supernatural elements in the story, though, launched a whole new genre, which took off in Europe.

Gothic literature employs dark and picturesque scenery, startling and melodramatic narrative devices, and an overall atmosphere of exoticism, mystery, fear, and dread. Often, a Gothic novel or story will revolve around a large, ancient house that conceals a terrible secret or serves as the refuge of an especially frightening and threatening character.

Clara Reeve, Ann Radcliffe, William Thomas Beckford, Matthew Lewis, Mary Shelley, Walter Scott, E. T. A. Hoffmann, Charles Dickens, Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Bram Stoker, Robert Louis Stevenson, Stephen King, Shirley Jackson, Anne Rice and Toni Morrison.

Mysteries of Udolpho, Wieland, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Frankenstein, The Tell-Tale Heart, Dracula, etc.

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The Influence and Meaning of Gothic Literature

This essay about the enduring legacy and profound exploration of human consciousness in Gothic literature, tracing its origins from Horace Walpole’s “The Castle of Otranto” to its evolution through the works of Mary Shelley, Edgar Allan Poe, and Bram Stoker. It highlights how Gothic fiction delves into primal fears and societal anxieties through its intricate settings, complex characters, and themes of decay and solitude. The essay also discusses the genre’s influence on contemporary literature, cinema, and visual arts, underscoring its ability to captivate and challenge audiences with its exploration of the irrational and the enigmatic aspects of human existence.

How it works

Gothic literature, a genre that thrived primarily during the late 18th and early 19th centuries, emerges as a standout in literary history owing to its unique amalgamation of terror, romanticism, and enigma. Renowned for its melodramatic plots, intricate settings, and an overarching sense of ominous gloom, Gothic literature delves into the realms of human psyche, the supernatural, and the terrains of the unknown and the incomprehensible. This genre, emerging in response to the Enlightenment’s exaltation of rationality and clarity, delves into the murkier and often irrational facets of human existence, delving into primal fears and yearnings.

The origins of Gothic fiction can be traced back to 1764 with the release of Horace Walpole’s tome “The Castle of Otranto,” widely acknowledged as the inaugural Gothic novel. Walpole’s opus laid the groundwork with its medieval backdrop, motifs of enigma and dread, and unearthly occurrences hinting at unspeakable horrors lurking beneath the veneer of everyday existence. The Gothic novel’s penchant for ancient or medieval settings symbolizes decay and desolation, reflecting the tumultuous and corrupted states of the human spirit, thereby rendering castles, monasteries, and sprawling forests with their shadowy, concealed passageways, indispensable elements of the genre.

As Gothic fiction evolved, it burgeoned into a richer and more intricate tapestry, embracing themes of solitude, morality, and societal hierarchy while plumbing the depths of its characters’ psyches. Writers such as Mary Shelley, Edgar Allan Poe, and Bram Stoker broadened the genre’s horizons to probe not merely external horrors but the inner machinations of the human mind. Shelley’s “Frankenstein” stands out for its profound existential musings, proffering not just a narrative of scientific recklessness but a poignant exploration of solitude, creation, and accountability. The creature, a synthesis of terror and empathy, compels readers to ponder the very essence of humanity.

Edgar Allan Poe, conversely, steered Gothic fiction into the realm of human consciousness, with tales that scrutinized themes of demise, degeneration, and lunacy. Poe’s meticulous craftsmanship in crafting atmosphere and locale heightened the psychological veracity of his narratives, rendering them paragons of the macabre. In “The Fall of the House of Usher,” for instance, the dilapidated ancestral mansion mirrors the decayed condition of both the Usher family and the narrator’s psyche, obfuscating the demarcation between reality and hallucination.

The influence of Gothic fiction transcends its historical epoch, enduring in modern literature and intersecting with diverse genres, including fantasy, horror, and enigma. The Gothic ethos, with its emphasis on ambience and psyche, continues to captivate contemporary readers and writers alike. Its motifs resonate in the works of Stephen King, Anne Rice, and even in the Southern Gothic literature of luminaries like Flannery O’Connor and William Faulkner, who transmute the traditional European settings into American backdrops suffused with the Gothic ethos of decay and grotesqueness.

Furthermore, Gothic literature’s impact extends beyond the realm of novels, permeating cinema, television, and visual arts, influencing the aesthetics and narrative techniques of filmmakers and artists. The eerie locales, suspenseful scores, and multifaceted characters that define numerous horror films are deeply entrenched in the Gothic tradition. This enduring allure underscores Gothic fiction’s profound ability to probe the fringes of human experience, the realms where rationality and irrationality intersect.

To conclude, Gothic fiction transcends its portrayal as a mere genre of haunted landscapes and supernatural horrors; it serves as a profound expedition into the murkier, oftentimes unspoken recesses of human consciousness and civilization. Its enduring legacy bears witness to literature’s capacity to delve into our deepest anxieties and yearnings, challenging our conceptions of sanity, reality, and ethics. Through its multifaceted characters, evocative settings, and labyrinthine plots, Gothic literature beckons us to peer beyond the veil of the mundane into the obscure recesses of the human spirit.

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