What is Gothic Literature?
The Gothic novel dominated English literature from its conception
in 1764 with the publication of The Castle of Ortanto by Horace Walpole has been
continually criticized by numerous critics for its sensationalism, melodramatic qualities,
and its play on the supernatural.
The genre drew many of its intense images from the graveyard
poets Gray and Thompson, intermingling a landscape of vast dark forest with vegetation
that bordered on excessive, concealed ruins with horrific rooms, monasteries and a forlorn
character who excels at the melancholy. A fabled spectre or perhaps a bleeding Nun were
images often sought after by those who fell victim to the supernatural influences of these
books. Gothic literature as a movement was a disappointment to the idealistic romantic
poets for the sentimental character idealized by Ann Radcliffe could not transcend into
reality.
Although the Gothic novel influenced many of the emerging genres,
the outpouring of Gothic novels started to ease by 1815 and with the publication of
Charles Maturin's Melmoth the Wanderer the genre began to fade. The Gothic novel
had come full circle, from rebellion to the Age of Reasons order, to its encompassing and
incorporation of Reason as derived from terror. The influence of the Gothic novel is felt
today in the portrayal of the alluring antagonist, whose evil characteristics appeal to
ones sense of awe, or the melodramatic aspects of romance, or more specifically in the
Gothic motif of a persecuted maiden forced apart from a true love.
The Gothic genre today has remained an elusive minor literary
upheaval that has had immense influence on genres today. Literary critics though, have
been slow to accept Gothic literature as a valuable genre. The first critics to examine
the Gothic, approached it reverently with historical interest. They tried to rescue it, to
revive the dead and obscure genre. These critics looked at the presence of the text by
examining it within a historical context. The original critical approach of historical
interpretation allowed the text to validate the text, as it was a reaction to the age of
reason, order, and politics of Eighteenth century England.
The development of the Gothic Novel from the melancholy overtures
of sentimental literature to the rise of the sublime in the graveyard poets had a profound
impact on the budding Romantic movement from Wordsworth to Shelley. The astounding
features and use of the sublime and the overt use of the supernatural, profoundly
influenced the style and material of the emerging romantics. Gothic Novels such as The
Castle of Otranto by Horace Walpole, The Adventures of Ferdinand Count Fathom
by Tobias Smollett, Longsword, Earl of Salisbury by Thomas Leland, The Old
English Baron: A Gothic Story by Clara Reeve and Vathek: An Arabian Tale by
William Beckford led Coleridge to write a Gothic drama, Shelley to write two Gothic Novels
and Byron to write Manfred.
The effects of the Gothic still reverberate though modern
literature from Joyce Carol Oats to Ann Rice. The literary motifs set forth by Horace
Walpole can be found scattered throughout all forms of literature, yet the Gothic Novel
has been left to molder in libraries in obscurity and except in rare instances, the novel
has all but vanished from the canon of western literature.
