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When romance is the main focus it’s called gothic romance. Dark paranormal
romance is the new gothic romance.
See also: What’s behind the wide appeal of all the horrible, brooding
YA boyfriends?
Its origin is attributed to English author Horace Walpole, with his 1764
novel The Castle of Otranto, subtitled (in its second edition) “A Gothic Story.”
It originated in England in the second half of the 18th century. Only in the late
1790s did “Gothic” take on some of the meanings we most frequently
associate with it today: Gothic as synonym for grotesque, ghastly and violently
superhuman.
The Gothic continued with much success in the 19th century, with the
popularity of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and the works of Edgar Allan
Poe. Another well known novel in this genre, dating from the late Victorian era,
is Bram Stoker’s Dracula.
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The height of the Gothic period is closely aligned with Romanticism (1764-
1840).
When the Gothic was emerging as an important genre in its own right, medical
science was just starting to replace the mystery of the female body with
scientific facts. Hysteria was the dominant response to sexual confusion and
abuse. Cultural codes were still writing marriage as a loss of power and
autonomous identity for women. Pregnancy and childbirth were downright
dangerous, messy and awful. Today things are a bit different: We understand
(basically) how the body works. We know that hysteria is actually depression.
Women are brought up to believe we can have it all (itself a kind of fairytale).
But the Gothic ideas are still recognisable to modern readers.
Gothic motifs change rapidly and consistently, both in form and in significance.
It all depends on what is feared and valued at any given time. The Gothic
genre is especially responsive to historical moment and cultural location.
Modern gothic stories don’t seek to expel the evil completely, but rather to
accommodate it and give it its own space. Modern gothic stories are about
finding some sort of middle ground.
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You don’t find [monsters] in gothic dungeons or humid forests. You find them
at the mall, at the school, in the town or city with the rest of us. But how do you
find them before they victimize someone? With animals, it depends on
perspective: The kitten is a monster to the bird, and the bird is a monster to the
worm. With man, it is likewise a matter of perspective, but more complicated,
because the rapist might first be the charming stranger, the assassin first the
admiring fan. The human predator, unlike the others, does not wear a costume
so different from ours that he can always be recognised by the naked eye.
Gothic stories are more popular in some eras than in others. Patricia
Murphy has said that, “A truism of critical commentary holds that the gothic
emerges in literature during times of cultural anxiety.”
The Gothic releases forces usually repressed. Mere anarchy is loosed and
contained at the same time. In Gothic, we have the return of the repressed.
Our enjoyment is visceral. We enjoy the cracking of bone and the nsapping of
backs and the spilling of blood. The appeal has something to do with
unrestraint, transgression, the overturning of normalcy. Taboos are broken. In
this respect, the Gothic is closely related to the carnivalesque.
The Gothic is basically ‘paranoid‘. But only if you immerse yourself too much
in it, succumbing to its fears. The modern media itself might be accused of
being Gothic, with its emphasis on the macabre.
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‘Uncanny’ is another word you’ll hear in reference to the
Gothic. The uncanny is a psychological concept which refers to something
that is strangely familiar, rather than simply mysterious. The emotions
evoked in a work of Gothic fiction will be familiar to you. You may not have
seen a ghost, but you know horripilation — that feeling of hair standing on end.
Here is the basic cast of characters for those original Gothic stories:
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American Gothic in particular tends to deal with a “madness” in one or
more of the characters. An early example is the novel Edgar Huntly or
Memoirs of a Sleepwalker by Charles Brockden Brown. Two characters
slowly become more and more deranged.
Likewise, the modern antihero (or hero-villain if you prefer) comes from the
Gothic tradition. However, in gothic stories morality is clear. Good is good, evil
is evil, even if it is attractive. Evil is not simply misunderstood, it is inherent.
Evil cannot be assimilated into everyday society and must be expelled. That’s
not how modern stories about anti-heroes typically play out. Viewers were
encouraged to understand Walter White and Tony Soprano. Thinking
individuals are much more yin-yang about people these days. Less nature,
more nurture — even if you’re a nature over nurture sort of person, you
probably admit that Tony Soprano’s life would have panned out differently had
he not grown up in the mafia.
Sunset Boulevard — Since Boulevard’s original film release, the role has
become famous for its tragic, hysterical femaleness, and is for that reason
vulnerable to one-dimensional renderings of empty, and even harmful,
stereotype. Boulevard subtextually warns that a woman’s ambition, creativity,
and desire for sexual fulfillment are the causes of unhappiness and undoing.
Fatal Attraction — While Norma of Sunset Boulevard is an artist, the
madwoman of Fatal Attraction is a professional.
Black Swan
Flowers In The Attic by Virginia Andrews
Apocalypse Now
The Shining by Stephen King — Isolation is used as a vehicle for madness.
(Used again more recently in Shut In.) The main character is Jack Torrence,
played by Jack Nicholson in Stanley Kubrick’s adaptation. With his family he
looks after an empty hotel one winter, partly to concentrate on writing his
novel. But he is haunted by visions and descends into murderous madness.
Carrie by Stephen King, which promotes anxiety and thereby encourages
conformity. A good example of ‘suburban Gothic’, making use of Gothic
features such as witch-hunting.
Misery by Stephen King
The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, who was herself
diagnosed with hysteria and commanded never to touch pencil and paper
again.
Shut In — Naomi Watts plays a widowed child psychologist who lives in
isolation in rural New England with her son, who is comatose and bedridden
as a result of an automobile accident. Snowed in and withdrawn from the
outside world, Watts’ character descends into a desperate existence. It soon
becomes difficult for her to distinguish the phantasms of her imagination from
the reality of the creepy goings-on in her apparently haunted house. Click
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through to read more about the psychological reasons for why we think we see
ghosts and phantoms.
As we learned from Misery, the story of the woman who holds a man captive
can never be a glamorous one. Over the course of Stephen King’s 1987 novel,
we’re led to understand that Annie’s insanity—her insecurity, her
obsession—is inextricable from that which makes her unlovable, a given
long before she ever stumbles across the luckless object of her affections, her
favorite writer, in the wreckage of his car. Dowdy and deranged, Annie forces
him to rewrite his final novel according to her whims, crooning, “I’m your
biggest fan,” over his tortured body.
And indeed, what could be beautiful or romantic about a woman with the
violent upper hand, the muse forcing herself on the artist—never mind that
the gendered inverse (see: Scheherazade’s dilemma) is the stuff of literature?
A story about woman holding a man against his will, especially if she seeks to
exploit his creative labor…Well, that’s just crazy. And for women, crazy, as
we all know, is not a Good Look.
The setting of the Gothic novel is a character in itself. The setting not only
evokes the atmosphere of horror and dread, but also portrays the deterioration
of its world. The decaying, ruined scenery implies that at one time there was a
thriving world. At one time the abbey, castle, or landscape was something
treasured and appreciated. Now, all that lasts is the decaying shell of a once
thriving dwelling.
The term “Gothic” originates with the ornate architecture created by Germanic
tribes called the Goths. It was then later expanded to include most of the
medieval style of architecture. The ornate and intricate style of this kind of
architecture proved to be the ideal backdrop for both the physical and the
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psychological settings in a new literary style, one which concerned itself with
elaborate tales of mystery, suspense, and superstition.
— ThoughtCo
a castle
an abbey
a monastery
crumbling battlements
ruined dwellings
a prison
an abandoned hospital
or some other, usually religious, edifice
This building will have secrets of its own, and can therefore almost be
considered a character in its own right (with weakness/needs/desires).
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WEAKNESS: A female character is an innocent, unwitting victim with no
particular moral weakness but she is weak in general owing to her
position/station in life.
BATTLE: There is a climactic encounter between the forces of evil and the
forces of good.
Evil characters are also seen in Gothic literature and especially American
Gothic. Depending on the time period that the work is written about, the evil
characters could be characters like Native Americans, trappers, gold miners
etc.
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Edgar Huntly, he experiences this element when he contemplates eating
himself, eats an uncooked panther, and drinks his own sweat.
REVEL AT ION & GOT HIC’S REL AT ION SHI P T O M YST ERY
Revelation is the basis of much plotted fiction, especially any story containing
a mystery—and that includes far more than detective or mystery fiction. Much
gothic fiction is founded on a central mystery. When a story’s main dynamic is
to have the protagonist find out something, or realize something that’s been
true for some time, the story’s narrative drive comes from the finding out,
not in the discovered fact itself. More similar to a ‘whydunnit’ mystery than a
‘whodunnit’, in other words.
T HE W OM AN I N T HE AT T IC T ROPE
The Mad Woman In The Attic is now a trope, though this real life story flips
it — a woman kept her husband in the attic and made him live like a bat.
Jane Eyre —Mr. Edward Rochester keeps his violently insane wife Bertha
locked in the attic of Thornfield. All the while, Rochester is romancing Jane.
The story is Jane’s gradual discovery of the unchanging but hidden state of
things. Except for the secret — the mystery — the story would be quite static.
Stranger Things, the Netflix TV show, also features a ‘girl in the attic’ trope in
Eleven. Stranger Things is indeed a gothic story:
One of the most interesting aspects of this show is how it’s reminiscent of
gothic fiction. A lot of early gothic is set in some kind of remote past yet
reflects contemporaneous issues. With Stranger Things we have a 21st
century TV show set in the 80s, which I guess for young people is a remote
past, but speaking to our contemporary moment. We are thus looking
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at Stranger Things not as an exercise in nostalgia, but as a text that speaks to
current issues like surveillance culture and the modern family. In short, it is
interesting how the show turns to the past to speak to the present.
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Varney the Vampire; or, the Feast of Blood (1847) by James Malcolm
Rymer
The Fall of the House of Usher (1839) by Edgar Allan Poe
The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886) by Robert Louis
Stevenson
Dracula (1897) by Bram Stoker — Vampires, haunted kingdoms, blood.
Jane Eyre
The Picture Of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde — a philosophical work about
getting old and indulgence. The main character becomes so obsessed with
stayng beautiful that he sells his soul. He occasionally goes up to the attic to
watch his portrait grow old.
The Woman In Black (1983) by Susan Hill — A best-seller from the 1980s. A
spooky visitor haunts a small town in England, warning that children are going
to die. It’s been adapted for stage and is a hit in West End.
Interview With The Vampire by Anne Rice — Written as an interview
between a reporter and a vampire called Louis de Pointe du Lac, who recounts
the last 200 years of his life. He is full of regret.
The Tell Tale Heart (1843) by Edgar Allan Poe — the murderous main
character is haunted by the sound of the beating heart of his victim, hidden in
pieces under the floorboards.
Wuthering Heights (1847) by Emily Bronte — Set on the moors, this story is
about class, survival, prejudice and is highly atmospheric.
The Tale Of Raw Head and Bloody Bones by Jack Wolf
10 Gothic historical stories and novels that interrogate history but aren’t
subject to it
Maryrose Wood uses this historical attitude in her gothic parody The
Mysterious Howling when she writes:
[Penelope the governess] had chosen Dante because she found the rhyme
scheme pleasingly jaunty, but she realised too late that the Inferno’s tale of
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sinners being cruelly punished in the afterlife was much too bloody and
disturbing to be suitable for young minds. Penelope could tell this by the way
the children hung on her every word and demanded “More, more!” each time
she reached the end of a canto and tried to stop […]
Penelope had begun reading poetry to the children in the belief that it would
improve their English faster than lists of spelling words ever could. Besides,
she personally found poetry very interesting, and since her students [literally
raised by wolves] were more or less blank slates when it came to literature,
she felt she might as well do what she liked. (As you may already know, the
Latin term for “blank slate” is tabula rasa, a phrase the Incorrigibles would no
doubt be exposed to a little further on in their educations.)
Recently we have those fears directed towards the Twilight series, in which
the passive heroine basically waits around to be saved by a creepy, much
older male monster. The fear is that girls in real life will hope to emulate this as
a script for their own romantic lives. (I admit, I have some sympathy for this
view myself, if girls are reading dark, paranormal fiction widely but not
critically. Then again, who’s to say they’re not critical of the very stories they
enjoy?)
Children’s stories have always been gothic. In fact, gothic stories belonged
to children all along. The Gothic romances for adults actually came out of
fairytales told while these adult readers were still children.
There was a lot of playing with Gothic conventions in the latter half of the
19th century, especially by woman writers, who were presumably reading
gothic romance/horror themselves for pleasure.
Another three 18th century woman writers started writing partly in order to
combat what they considered worrying trends in contemporary children’s
fiction. These women were Mary Wollstonecraft, Anna Laetitia Barbauld and
Maria Edgeworth. Bear in mind that each of these women used Gothic
features in their writing for children but it wasn’t actually Gothic because they
didn’t want to expose children to ghosts. Also, each and every one of them
wrote Gothic stories for adults in a different part of her writing career, exposing
a double standard. We love the Gothic and find it entertaining, but not for
children, whose minds are easily corrupted.
Influential male writers have said they loved to read Gothic chapbooks as
children. These men include: Boswell, Johnson, Carlyle, Goethe, Lamb,
Wordsworth and Coleridge. Yet chapbooks were never culturally approved.
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(Chapbooks were magazine type products sold door-to-door — an important
means of cultural dissemination before people could afford books.) Chap
books were considered trash fiction.
Fear (or the pretence of fear) is very popular right now in children’s literature.
This is the modern take on ‘gothic’.
What does the Gothic look like in children’s literature? Gothic motifs in general
are very well-suited to exploring adolescence, and the way identity seems to
change from day to day. With the menarche, girls face blood — another Gothic
motif (wayward fluids, murder). Elements include:
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Bugaboos such as chimney sweeps, Wee Willy Winkies and other creatures
from urban folklore. (Bugaboos come in the night.)
Ghouls — The ghoul is the classic Gothic monster. They frighten us
andtransform the familiar into the strange and threatening.
Ghosts, spectres, phantoms, apparitions and general hauntings
Schools are often the proxy for haunted mansions and castles.
The schoolyard is the forest.
Irony and parody is very gothic, so anything meta in the style of Lemony
Snicket borrows from the Gothic tradition. There’s a lot of parody of Victorian
settings.
The Gothic is to do with transgression, lack of restraint and the
overturning of normality. For example, Gothic villains break taboos, as do
young children, by not doing as they’re told. See again The Carnivalesque,
which is a tradition with a long history in children’s literature. No wonder Gothic
features so heavily in stories for the young.
A lot of Gothic stories have a ‘jump’ ending. Take the oral versions of Little
Red Riding Hood, for instance, in which the storyteller grabs the listener as if
she is about to get eaten by the wolf. A number of modern stories for young
children are also designed to be performed as much as read.
The Gothic warns readers of the dangers mysteriously close to even the
most familiar places. The Gothic tells us that the world is not safe. How
many children’s stories teach that? Quite a number. Pretty much any story
that’s not pastoral is teaching children that same lesson: Be vigilant, be
smart, stick with your friends, know friends from enemies.
Gothic children’s literature often takes the form of fantasy. If the Gothic is
about fear of desire, fantasy is a great genre to explore that because fantasy
teaches the reader to desire.
A lot of children’s stories use the trope of the Explained Ghost. Basically,
there’s some sort of supernatural happenings in the world of the story
which is later revealed to have been just the over-workings of a foolish
mind. This trope is used to teach the reader that there is no such thing as
ghosts and whatnot, and to always dig deeper for the truth behind our
fancies. Nevertheless, even the Explained Ghost tropes themselves rely upon
Gothic motifs and traditions. That’s not to say traditional Gothic stories
themselves didn’t make use of the Explained Ghost. Ann Radcliffe herself
used it, though perhaps to a different end (to show up rational thinking by
later subverting it).
There are a lot of orphans in children’s literature. Absent maternity is a
feature of the Gothic.
Unlike in Gothic romance for adults, child heroes are mostly given
something to fight back with. They don’t wait around to be rescued, except
in the odd parody. This is in line with the general advice when writing for
children: heroes must be proactive and basically get themselves out of their
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own predicaments. They may ask for help from a mentor, but no one’s coming
to save them.
The writer must be familiar with gothic motifs and tropes and settings —
familiar enough to parody them, and to manage whether readers will find
something scary or funny (or both).
Writers can take gothic motifs and transplant them to a new setting. This
creates a kind of neo-Gothic (to borrow from the term neo-Western). For
example, writers may take the labyrinthine qualities of a castle and reuse them
in a dystopian city or in a setting inspired by cyberspace.
Be clear with yourself: Are you achieving the former? If not, you’re writing
didactic, 19th century work.
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Leo: A Ghost Story by Mac Barnett and Christian Robinson — a picture book
about a ghost called Leo who lives alone in a deserted house.
The Dark by Lemony Snickett and Jon Klassen — a picture book set in a big,
scary, empty, dark house. In reality the house is probably an ordinary one,
replete with a mother/father, but the representation of the house on the page is
how the boy feels about it.
Ghostlight by Sonia Gensler — An American Gothic tale including an
abandoned haunted mansion, spooky movies, imaginary games, film-making
(a popular device in ghost stories).
Doll Bones by Holly Black — A coming of age novel about a boy called Zach
who plays with dolls. His father throws his creepy porcelain dolls away but this
isn’t the last we see of them.
The Spiderwick Chronicles by Holly Black
The Tricksters by Margaret Mahy
Gothic Hospital by Gary Crew
The Devil Latch by Sonya Hartnett
The Seventh Tower by Garth Nix
Thirsty by M.T. Anderson — the main character can’t join in his culture’s
hatred of the monstrous because he has discovered it within himself. He has
to find a way of living which is neither killing himself nor accepting his fate.
Good Masters, Sweet Ladies by Laura Amy Schlitz — As Kate de Goldi said
in her RNZ interview review, the author uses Victorian Gothic really skilfully in
her books. It’s a great playground for children’s writers at the moment: Writers
don’t have to wrestle with technology in the story and this historical setting is
dark and mysterious and very colourful, and lends an air of fantasy. This is a
really good story. There are big things being talked about women’s place,
about exploitation at all levels of life. The author looks very interestingly at
disability and writes really tenderly about unusual friendships about people
who are marginalised.
Splendors and Glooms by Laura Amy Schlitz — The things that Schlitz did
well in her first novel were done equally well in this one. (There are two titles
for this book depending on the continent.) This is a fantastic adventure about
two orphans who work for an Italian puppeteer. They live in poverty. This is a
fable, of sorts. Names of characters are really important in this: Clara (light)
Wintermute (she can’t speak). In her house she’s been silenced by the grief of
her parents. Four of her siblings died in the cholera epidemic but she survived
and has the guilt of a survivor. While the plot may sound a bit hokey, the
writing is very beautiful. The music, the rhythm of the words… We learn a
huge amount of detail about Victorian London. Something Schlitz does without
any shrinking is show the evil capacity of ordinary adults. It’s quite frightening
the way the adults have buried sexual desires which are under the surface of
the text. Having said that, this is very much a children’s story. The end is
elevating.
Then there are books which are not obviously Gothic, but influenced by the
tradition. The labyrinthine computer game stories set in cyberspace calling to
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mind the structures of Gothic castles, are one example. Themes in common:
double consciousness, metafiction, moral disintegration. In this way, 19th
century Gothic fiction has a lot in common with ultra-contemporary speculative
work.
FURTHER READING
— Dr Phillip Serrato
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