Notes on the Gothic Mode, Angela Carter
Carter wrote Notes on the Gothic Mode in 1975. It addresses the categorisation of her early work as ‘Gothic’, and her deliberate attempt to create a Gothic novel with Heroes and Villains. The ‘non-naturalistic formula’ of the ‘Gothic mode’, Carter writes, provided ‘a wonderful sense of freedom’.
Further on, Carter defines her current ambitions as a writer in relation to the Gothic. Arguing that all art is political, Carter characterises the Gothic as a radical genre. She, ‘believe[s] that a fiction absolutely self-conscious of itself as a different form of human experience than reality (that is, not a logbook of events) can help to transform reality itself.’ Unlike naturalism – which, in Carter’s view, tends to affirm the status quo – the Gothic offers imagined alternatives. It draws no moral lessons but has a single moral function: ‘provoking unease’. It also never commits ‘the greatest crime against the human spirit’ – to be boring. Quoting the Marquis de Sade, Carter concludes by declaring that she aspires to ‘“the perpetual immoral subversion of the established order”’.
