Professional Documents
Culture Documents
I. Elements of Horror Fiction:: Source: William C. Robinson, University of Tennessee
I. Elements of Horror Fiction:: Source: William C. Robinson, University of Tennessee
Gothic Horror
GOTHIC is a term sometimes used instead of HORROR. As Grolier says, "The earliest Gothic romance, a class
of novel dealing in the mysterious and supernatural, which emerged shortly after the establishment of the novel
form itself, was Horace Walpole's Castle of Otranto (1764). Reacting against the literalism and confined
domesticity of Samuel Richardson, Walpole indulged a contemporary taste for the "Gothic," which for the 18th-
century reader conjured up a medieval world of barbarous passions enacted in picturesque melodramatic settings
of ruined castles, ancient monasteries, and wild landscapes. Within a plot designed for suspense, a delicate
feminine sensibility is subjected to the onslaught of elemental forces of good and evil. Sanity and chastity are
constantly threatened, and over all looms the suggestion that evil and irrationality will destroy civilization."
Atmosphere
The dark, brooding, threatening atmosphere becomes the main character in many horror stories. Thus, mood and
setting are as or more important than plot and characters. The atmosphere is often portrayed in
considerable detail so it becomes alive and immediately threatening.
In a way similar to the Neo-gothic rejection of the aesthetics of the neoclassical it became linked with a rejection
of the reason and logic associated with said style in the form of appreciation of the joys of extreme emotion and
the sublime. The ruins of gothic buildings gave rise to these emotions by indicating the inevitable decay and
collapse of human creations, thus the craze for building fake ruined churches on English country estates as part
of landscape architecture. These feelings were also connected to the anti-catholicism created by the Reformation.
Good Protestants were supposed to associate medieval buildings with a dark and terrifying period, envisioning the
Catholic Church oppressing people with harsh laws, torture and superstitious rituals.
The first gothic novels
'Gothic' came to be applied to the literary genre precisely because the genre dealt with such emotional extremes
and dark themes, and because it found its most natural settings in the buildings of this style: Castles, Mansions
and Monasteries, often remote, crumbling and ruined. It was a fascination with this architecture and its related art,
poetry (see Graveyard poets) and even landscape gardening that inspired the first wave of gothic novelists:
Horace Walpole, whose seminal The Castle of Otranto is often regarded as the first true gothic novel, was
obsessed with fake medieval gothic architecture and built his own house Strawberry Hill in that form, sparking off
a fashion for gothic revival.
Walpole's novel arose out of this obsession with the medieval. Here rather than a fake building he originally
claimed it was a real medieval romance he had discovered and republished. Thus was born the gothic novel's
association with fake documentation to increase its effect. The Castle of Otranto was originally titled a Romance
a literary form which was held by educated taste to be tawdry and not even fit for children due to its superstitious
elements, but Walpole revived some of the elements of the medieval romance in a new form. The basic plot
created many other the gothic staples including a threatening mystery and an ancestral curse, as well as
countless trappings: hidden passages, oft-fainting heroines, etc. It was however Ann Radcliffe who created the
gothic novel in its standard form. Radcliffe introduced the brooding figure of the gothic villain, which developed
into the Byronic hero. Unlike Walpole's, her novels were best-sellers and virtually everyone in English society was
reading them. Radcliffe created a craze and had many imitators; the results were parodied in Jane Austen's
Northanger Abbey by setting up the atmosphere of doom in which one of the characters sits awake late at night
imagining the noises she hears to portend all sorts of horrors owing to the gothic novels she has been reading
and sweeping it away with hearty common sense and normalcy. Mary Shelley's Frankenstein 1818 is undoubtedly
the greatest literary triumph of the gothic novel in this its classical period.
Later Developments
In England, the gothic novel as a genre had largely played itself out by 1840. This was largely helped by the over-
saturation of the genre by cheap 'pulp' writers (works that would later morph into cheap horror fiction in the form of
Penny dreadfuls as well as a reduction in the genres respectability since the turn of the century caused by the
publication of works such as Matthew Gregory Lewis' The Monk in(1796, a shocking (particularly at the time) tale
of sex, violence and debauchery that almost bordered on the pornographic. However it had a lasting effect on the
development of literary form in the Victorian period. It led to the Victorian craze for short ghost stories and the
short shocking macabre tale mastered by Edgar Allan Poe. It also was a heavy influence on Charles Dickens who
read gothic novels as a teenager and incorporated their gloomy atmosphere and melodrama into his own works,
but shifting them to a more modern period. The mood and themes of the gothic novel held a particular fascination
for the Victorians, with their morbid obsession with mourning rituals, Mementos, and mortality in general, which
led to them becoming a widespread literary influence.
Post-Victorian Legacy
By the 1880s it was time for revival as a gothic as a semi-respectable literary form. This was the period of the
gothic works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Arthur Machen and Oscar Wilde, and the most famous gothic villain ever
appeared in Bram Stokers Dracula 1897. From these, the gothic genre strictly considered gave way to modern
horror fiction though many literary critics use the term to cover the entire genre: though many modern writers of
horror or indeed other fiction extend considerable gothic sensibilities: Anne Rice being one example, as well as
some of the less sensationalist works of Stephen King. The gothic tradition has also expanded its boundaries to
films and music, as well as the new media forms of the internet.