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FLORINE STETTHEIMER

This is difficult— I have yet to read a definition that encompasses the Gothic genre. Patrick Kennedy defines it as “writing that employs dark and picturesque scenery, startling and melodramatic narrative devices, and an overall atmosphere of exoticism, mystery, fear, and dread” but this doesn’t ring quite true— yes, the Gothic deals with dread, but it does not always have dark and picturesque scenery, and it does not always rely on exoticism. James Greaver and Ginna Wilkerson define it as “a style of writing that is characterized by elements of fear, horror, death, and gloom, as well as romantic elements, such as nature, individuality, and very high emotion” and while this comes closer, it doesn’t necessarily encompass all of Gothic. Enclyclopedia.com defines it as “a literary movement that focused on ruin, decay, death, terror, and chaos, and privileged irrationality and passion over rationality and reason, grew in response to the historical, sociological, psychological, and political contexts of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries” which isn’t wrong, but also is missing slightly.

So, I can’t really offer a good defintion, but I can tell you about issues the Gothic is concerned with.

the sublime : a combination of awe and terror. Poets.org has a good article on this concept. and in relation to the sublime:

the unexplainable : the Gothic was very much a response to the enlightenment’s attempt to realise and create explanation— the questions the Gothic poses are Are there things beyond science? How do we react to what cannot be explained with scientific and logical means?

excess : emotion and stakes are high. Consider the impassioned love confessions of Wuthering Heights (“You said I killed you— haunt me, then!”) the debauchery and decadence of Dorian Gray (see also: the decadent movement, which was intimately related to the Gothic). Gothic lovers are lovers who often have potential to destroy one another because of their excess of emotion and desire. It’s like opera: everything is heightened by the experience of the sublime surroundings. The human spirit is expanded, often until it bursts.

boundaries and trangression/violation of those boundaries : boundaries of death, boundaries of gender, boundaries of social class, boundaries of race, boundaries of desire, boundaries of mind and reality. In Frankenstein this might be Victor creating the creature; it may be Carmilla’s lesbian (and thus transgressive) desire for Laura: it may be Will Graham’s desire to enact violence as an independent agent rather than as an agent of the law. I mentioned the sublime before, and I want to note that the sublime itself is transgressive: it’s beyond normal human experience. and in this regard it’s also about:

setting : setting is never just setting: it’s also psychological, a reflection of the characters. Brontë compares Catherine to the landscape she inhabits;

the horror of imagination and the psychological interior : Emily Dickinson: “one need not be a chamber to be haunted”. Consider Freud’s idea of the unconscious mind. I don’t know if you’ve seen Stalker (a film by Andrei Tarkovsky) but one plot element it has is called the “Room” which grants the wishes of anyone who sets food inside. but it’s not about what you actually wish for— it’s about your innermost desire, one you may not even be conscious of. There’s the story of a man who went with his brother to the room, and his brother died along the way. And he entered the room, and then he inherited a lot of money, which led him to commit suicide. Why? Because it revealed that his greatest desire was not to bring back his brother, but to be wealthy. The horror of that realization compelled him to kill himself. The Gothic is very much about people confronting their interiors: the horrors they have committed (willingly or unwillingly), the horrors their family committed, the horrors they discover that reveal the darkness someone close to them (Bluebeard), the horrors of history (consider Toni Morrison’s Beloved), etc. The interior is often the historical, and the plot of Gothic novels can almost only end when it is confronted.

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