GOTHIC FICTION

Introduction

by Peter Otto

3 - Gothic origins

In the earliest usage of the word, "gothic" refers to the language and customs of the Goths and, more broadly, the Germanic peoples who in the third, fourth and fifth centuries AD harried the Roman Empire, capturing Athens in 267-8 and sacking Rome in 410. For the Renaissance, therefore, Gothic and Classic were opposites: gothic barbarism, superstition and violence were the abhorred contraries to Classical civilisation, reason and peace. This contrast conditions the gradual extension of the word's referent to include the barbarous, uncouth and unpolished in general. And this more general sense of the word in turn governs, from at least the last decade of the seventeenth century, the use of gothic to mean the medieval. In comparison with the art of the Greeks and Romans, medieval art, architecture and society was thought to be barbaric or, in other words, gothic. Addison illustrates this collocation of the gothic, the barbaric and the medieval in The Spectator, No. 62 (May 11, 1711). Those writers, he opines, who lack the "strength of genius to give that majestic simplicity to nature, which we so much admire in the works of the antients", are "Goths in poetry, who like those in architecture, not being able to come up to the beautiful simplicity of the old Greeks and Romans, have endeavoured to supply its place with all the extravagancies of an irregular fancy".

In the course of the eighteenth century, however, the relative merits of the Classic and the Gothic were reassessed. Rather than providing evidence of a "disordered fancy", the distance of the Gothic from Greco-Roman "civilisation" was now taken as evidence of the former's truth to nature and freedom from artifice. Although predated by the rise of antiquarian interest in the Gothic, arguably this reassessment begins with a group of mid eighteenth-century writers that includes Thomas Gray, Joseph and Thomas Warton, Bishop Richard Hurd and Horace Walpole. The extent of the cultural shift fostered by these writers can be seen in Hurd's Letters on Chivalry and Romance (1762), where the Renaissance estimation of the relative merits of the Gothic and the Classic is reversed, at least in relation to poetic matters. "The gallantry, which inspirited the feudal times", Hurd writes, furnished "the poet with finer scenes and subjects of description in every view, than the simple and uncontrolled barbarity of the Grecian".

For our purposes, the most important member of this group is the last. Horace Walpole's neo-gothic villa, Strawberry Hill, is the most well-known and influential example of the eighteenth-century Gothic revival in architecture. His novella, The Castle of Otranto, a story (London: Tho. Lownds, 1764), is usually regarded as the first Gothic fiction.

When Walpole subtitled the second edition of The Castle of Otranto, "A Gothic Story", he used the word "Gothic" to mean "medieval". His book was an attempt to evoke "the manners of ancient days", of the medieval world. As presented by The Castle of Otranto, these were "the darkest ages of christianity", in which society was plagued by superstitions, supernatural apparitions and violent passions. Yet, at the same time, the medieval is presented as a necessary counter-balance to the more enlightened world of modernity. In the ancient romance, Walpole writes, "all was imagination and improbability". In the modern romance, "the great resources of fancy have been dammed up, by a strict adherence to commonlife".

In The Castle of Otranto, Walpole attempted to blend both genres, to bring modern fiction into relation with its primitive roots. This involved a return, as Walpole's account of the story's genesis suggests, not merely to a superstitious past but to the irrational springs of the psyche:

“I waked one morning ... from a dream, of which all I could recover was, that I had thought myself in an ancient castle (a very natural dream for a head filled like mine with Gothic story) and that on the uppermost banister of a great staircase I saw a gigantic hand in armour. In the evening I sat down and began to write, without knowing in the least what I intended to say or relate.”

While writing this book, Walpole confessed to Madame Du Deffand, "visions and passions choked me. I wrote it without regard for rules, critics, and philosophers".

The Castle of Otranto includes many of the motifs that were to became staples of the genre it founds: the castle, subterranean vaults, the supernatural, the persecuted heroine, the villainous father, and so on. It touched on many of the themes that became Gothic staples: incest and forbidden passion; the oedipal rivalry between father and son; the uncanny return of the past in the present; the rupture of the everyday by acts of violence, and the subsequent revelation of what has been hidden or repressed; the tomb as a liminal space between life and death or between rational and irrational/demonic aspects of the psyche. At the same time, its collocation of the "primitive" (that is, superstition, emotion and imagination) with the realistic language of the modern romance anticipates later Gothic attempts to compose a language of the psyche.

Nevertheless, the heyday of the Gothic did not begin until the last decade of the eighteenth century, sparked by the publication of Ann Radcliffe's third and fourth novels, The Romance of the Forest (1791) and The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794). In the nearly thirty years that divided the publication of The Castle of Otranto from The Romance of the Forest a relatively small, but nevertheless significant group of novelists followed in Walpole's footsteps, many represented in this collection by first editions of their key works.

Perhaps the most significant is Clara Reeve's The champion of virtue. A Gothic story (Colchester: Printed for the Author, 1777), reissued in 1778 under the more well-known title of The Old English Baron. This book is, Reeve writes in her Preface to the second edition, "the literary offspring of the Castle of Otranto, written upon the same plan, with a design to unite the most attractive and interesting circumstances of the ancient Romance and modern Novel". It is also, as Frank observes, "the Gothic tradition's linking corridor between the supernatural medievalism of Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto and Mrs. Radcliffe’s romances".

Of course, there are "passages" leading to Radcliffe's fiction, the genre as a whole and/or its sub genres, that communicate with other rooms in the castle of eighteenth-century fiction. William Beckford's An Arabian tale, from an unpublished manuscript (London: J. Johnson, 1786; later published as Vathek), drawing on the tropes of the oriental tale, is the ur-text for oriental gothic. Sophia Lee's The Recess; or, A tale of other times (London: T. Cadell, 1783-5) is an important early instance of historical gothic, key examples of which are grouped in the fourth section of the collection. As such it looks back to Thomas Leland's Longsword, Earl of Salisbury. An historical romance (London: W. Johnston, 1762). Published two years before The Castle of Otranto, Leland's novel is sometimes cited as the "true" founding-text of the Gothic, although it lacks the supernatural machinery that is a key part of the genre.

In Mrs Harley's The castle of Mowbray, an English romance (London: C. Stalker and H. Setchell, 1788) and Susannah Gunning's Barford Abbey, a novel in a series of letters (London: T. Cadell; and J. Payne, 1768), the novel of sensibility has started to become a vehicle for gothic passions, actors, and scenarios. Also drawing on the novel of sensibility, the portrait of the heroine and her vicissitudes in Charlotte Smith's Emmeline (London: T. Cadell, 1788) and Ethelinde, or The recluse of the lake (London: T. Cadell, 1789) strongly influenced Radcliffe's work. Indeed, Smith is sometimes thought to deserve the rank of "co-creator of the School of Radcliffe".25 Also deserving of mention is John Moore's Zelucco (London: A. Strahan and T. Cadell, 1789). The hedonism, unrestrained passion, and sadistic cruelty of its chief characters, Zelucco and Nerina, strongly influenced Gothic and romantic villains, the latter anticipating the character of Matilda in Matthew Lewis's The Monk.

By the end of the eighties, the early Gothic of Walpole, Reeves and Lee was sufficiently established to be the subject of satires such as James White's Earl Strongbow: or, The history of Richard de Clare and the beautiful Geralda (London: J. Dodsley, 1789), and was popular enough to attract imitators and plagiarists, such as Mrs Harley in her Priory of St. Bernard; an old English tale (London: Minerva, 1789), a near plagiarism of The Recess. In this same year, Ann Radcliffe published her first novel, The castles of Athlin and Dunbayne. A Highland story (London: T. Hookham, 1789), although it was at first almost completely ignored by the critics.

4 - Gothic Revolutions

5 - The Northanger Novels

6 - Radcliffe and her Imitators

7 - Lewis and her Followers

8 - Terror and Horror Gothic

9 - Gothic Echoes / Gothic Labyrinths

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