THE ENGLISH GOTHIC NOVEL: A BRIEF
OVERVIEW
The English Gothic novel began with Horace
Walpole's The Castle of Otranto (1765), which was enormously
popular and quickly imitated by other novelists and soon became a
recognizable genre. To most modern readers, however, The Castle of
Otranto is dull reading; except for the villain Manfred, the
characters are insipid and flat; the action moves at a fast clip with
no emphasis or suspense, despite the supernatural manifestations and a
young maiden's flight through dark vaults. But contemporary readers
found the novel electrifyingly original and thrillingly suspenseful,
with its remote setting, its use of the supernatural, and its medieval
trappings, all of which have been so frequently imitated and so poorly
imitated that they have become stereotypes. The genre takes its name
from Otranto's medieval–or Gothic–setting; early Gothic
novelists tended to set their novels in remote times like the Middle
Ages and in remote places like Italy (Matthew Lewis's The Monk,
1796) or
the Middle East (William Beckford's Vathek, 1786).
What makes a work Gothic is a combination of at
least some of these elements:
- a castle, ruined or intact, haunted or
not (the castle plays such a key role that it has been called the main
character of the Gothic novel),
- ruined buildings which are sinister or
which arouse a pleasing melancholy,
- dungeons, underground passages, crypts,
and catacombs which, in modern houses, become spooky basements or
attics,
- labyrinths, dark corridors, and winding
stairs,
- shadows, a beam of moonlight in the
blackness, a flickering candle, or the only source of light failing (a
candle blown out or, today, an electric failure),
- extreme landscapes, like rugged
mountains, thick forests, or icy wastes, and extreme weather,
- omens and ancestral curses,
- magic, supernatural manifestations, or
the suggestion of the supernatural,
- a passion-driven, wilful villain-hero
or villain,
- a curious heroine with a tendency to
faint and a need to be rescued–frequently,
- a hero whose true identity is revealed
by the end of the novel,
- horrifying (or terrifying) events or
the threat of such happenings.
The Gothic creates feelings of gloom, mystery, and suspense and tends
to the dramatic and the sensational, like incest, diabolism,
necrophilia, and nameless terrors. It crosses boundaries, daylight and
the dark, life and death, consciousness and unconsciousness.
Sometimes covertly, sometimes explicitly, it presents transgression,
taboos, and fears–fears of violation, of imprisonment, of social chaos,
and of emotional collapse. Most of us immediately recognize the Gothic
(even if we don't know the name) when we encounter it in novels,
poetry, plays, movies, and TV series. For some of us–and I include
myself– safely experiencing dread or horror is thrilling and enjoyable.
Elements of the Gothic have made their way into
mainstream writing. They are found in Sir Walter Scott's novels,
Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre , and Emily Brontë's Wuthering
Heights and in Romantic poetry like Samuel Coleridge's
"Christabel," Lord Byron's "The Giaour," and John Keats's "The Eve of
St. Agnes." A tendency to the macabre and bizarre which appears in
writers like William Faulkner, Truman Capote, and Flannery O'Connor has
been called Southern Gothic.
THE GOTHIC AND WUTHERING
HEIGHTS
Whether or not Wuthering Heights should
be classified
as a Gothic novel (certainly it is not merley a Gothic novel),
it
undeniably contains Gothic elements.
In true Gothic fashion, boundaries are
trespassed, specifically love crossing the boundary between life and
death and
Heathcliff's transgressing social class and family ties.
Brontë follows Walpole and Radcliffe in portraying
the tyrannies of the father and the cruelties of the
patriarchal family and in reconstituting the family
on non-patriarchal lines, even though no counterbalancing matriarch or
matriarchal family is presented. Brontë has incorporated the
Gothic trappings of imprisonment and escape, flight,
the persecuted heroine, the heroine wooed by a dangerous
and a good suitor, ghosts, necrophilia, a mysterious
foundling, and revenge. The weather-buffeted Wuthering
Heights is the traditional castle, and Catherine resembles
Ann Radcliffe's heroines in her appreciation of nature.
Like the conventional Gothic hero-villain, Heathcliff
is a mysterious figure who destroys the beautiful woman
he pursues and who usurps inheritances, and with typical
Gothic excess he batters his head against a tree. There
is the hint of necrophilia in Heathcliff's viewings of Catherine's
corpse and his plans to be buried next to her and a hint of incest in
their being raised as brother and sister or, as a few critics have
suggested, in Heathcliff's being Catherine's illegitimate half-brother.
A FEMINIST THEORY OF THE GOTHIC
AND WUTHERING HEIGHTS
Ellen Moers has propounded a feminist theory that
relates
women writers in general and Emily Brontë in particular to the
Gothic.
Middle-class women who wanted to write were hampered by the
conventional image of ladies as submissive, pious, gentle, loving,
serene, domestic angels; they had to overcome the conventional
patronizing, smug, unempowering, contemptuous sentimentalizing of women
by reviewers like George Henry Lewes, who looked down on women writers:
Women's proper sphere of activity is
elsewhere [than writing]. Are there no husbands, lovers, brothers,
friends to coddle and console? Are there no stockings to darn, no
purses to make, no braces to embroider? My idea of a perfect
woman is one who can write but won't. (1850)
Those women who overcame the limitations of their social roles and did
write found it more difficult to challenge or reject society's
assumptions and expectations than their male counterparts. Ellen Moers
identifies heroinism, a form of literary feminism, as one way women
circumvented this difficulty. (Literary feminism and feminism may
overlap but they are not the same, and a woman writer who adopts
heroinism is not necessarily a feminist.) Heroinism takes many forms,
such as the intellectual or thinking heroine, the passionate or
woman-in-love heroine, and the traveling heroine. Clearly all the
Brontë sisters utilize the passionate heroine, whether knowingly
or not, to express subversive values and taboo experiences covertly.
What subversive values and taboo experiences does
Emily Brontë express with her passionate heroine Catherine? Moers
sees subversion in Brontë's acceptance of the cruel as a normal,
almost an energizing part of life and in her portrayal of the erotic in
childhood. The cruelty connects this novel to the Gothic tradition,
which has been associated with women writers since Anne Radcliffe . The
connection was, in fact, recognized by Brontë's contemporaries;
the Athenaeum reviewer labeled the Gothic elements in Wuthering
Heights "the eccentricities of ‘woman's fantasy'" (1847). Moers
thinks a more accurate word than eccentricities would be perversities.
These perversities may have originated in "fantasies derived from the
night side of the Victorian nursery–a world where childish cruelty and
childish sexuality come to the fore." Of particular importance for
intellectual middle-class women who never matured sexually was the
brother-sister relationship. In childhood, sisters were the equal of
their brothers, played just as hard, and felt the same pleasures and
pains; girls clung to this early freedom and equality, which their
brothers outgrew, and displaced them into their writing:
Women writers of Gothic fantasies appear
to testify that the physical teasing they received from their
brothers–the pinching, mauling, and scratching we dismiss as the
unimportant of children's games–took on outsize proportions and
powerful erotic overtones in their adult imaginations. (Again, the
poverty of their physical experience may have caused these
disproportions, for it was not only sexual play but any kind of
physical play for middle-class women that fell under the Victorian
ban.)
Moers applies this principle to the Brontës'
chronicles of Angria and Gondal, which the sisters collaborated on with
their brother. Their turbulent sagas are filled with unbridled
passions, imprisonment, adultery, incest, murder, revenge, and warfare.
Thus the uncensored fantasies of Angria and Gondal, whose imaginative
hold Emily never outgrew, may have provided an outlet for the sisters'
imaginations, passions, and aspirations; fostered their intellectual
and artistic equality with their brother; and provided the model for
Emily's impassioned Heathcliff and Catherine as well as for Charlotte's
Rochester.
Brontë: Table of Contents
March 23, 2009
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