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The Gothic: What is it?

A post-medieval and post-Renaissance phenomenon that can combine long-standing literary

forms
First published work to call itself a gothic story: Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764)
Gothic explosion in the 1790s through the British Isles, throughout Europe, and briefly in the
U.S., particularly for female readership
The Gothic remained a popular and controversial literary mode throughout the Romantic period
(1790s-1830s)
Highly unstable genre that appears in many different forms—Victorian novel, plays and operas,
magazine and newspaper articles and stories, “sensational novels” for the working class and
women, poetry, painting, etc.
Classic “gothics”: Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The
Yellow Wallpaper,” Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897), Henry James The Turn of the Screw (1898).
In the 20th century, the gothic explodes into a wide range of different cultural products: the
novel, television, film.

Some gothic conventions that can appear in different combinations:

Setting: an antiquated or seemingly antiquated space (castle, foreign palace, abbey, a vast
prison, subterranean crypt, graveyard, primeval frontier or island, large old house or theatre,
aging city or urban underworld, decaying storehouse, factory, public building, or some new
recreation of an older venue such as an office with old filing cabinets, an overworked spaceship,
or a computer memory.
Secrets: Within this space, secrets from the past are hidden that haunt the characters,
psychologically, physically or otherwise.
Hauntings: These hauntings can take many forms but frequently assume the features of ghosts,
spectors, or monsters (mixing features from different realms of being, often life and death).
The hauntings rise from within the antiquated space (or invade it from alien realms) to manifest
unresolved crimes or conflicts that can no longer be successfully buried from view.
Crossing boundaries: Gothic tales raise the possibility that the boundaries between the earthly
laws of conventional reality and the supernatural have been crossed.
Terror gothic: holds characters and readers in suspense about threats to life, safety, and sanity
kept out of sight or in shadows or suggestions from a hidden past.
Horror gothic: confronts the principle characters with the gross violence of
physical/psychological dissolution, shattering the assumed norms (including the repressions) of
everyday life with shocking/revolting consequences.

Confronting the past: Readers caught between the attractions/terrors of a past once controlled by
aristocrats or priests, and the forces of change that would reject such a past yet still remain held by
aspects of it (including desires for aristocratic or superhuman powers). The gothic as a means of
confronting what is psychologically buried in individuals and groups; the gothic as a haunting of
deep-seated social/historical dilemmas.

The female gothic: Though the gothic is often about the “son” who wants to kill/strive to become the
“father,” women have used the gothic to create gothic heroines who seek to appease/free themselves
from male/patriarchal dominance (ie, Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre (1847). Women are the figures
most fearfully trapped between contradictory pressures and impulses, in gothic circumstances–caught
in a labyrinth of darkness full of cloisters underground and hesitant about what course to take there,
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fearing the pursuit of a domineering and lascivious patriarch who wants to use her womb as a
repository for seed that may help him preserve his property and wealth (but if she flees she may be
trapped by another man, who knows who?

--from Hogle, Jerrold. “Introduction: the Gothic in western culture.” The Cambridge Companion to
Gothic Fiction. Ed. Jerrold Hogle. Cambridge UP, 2002: 1-20.

The Sublime

The word sublime conveys a sense of height or loftiness, coming to signify the highest in a
particular category (ie, the sublime style, the sublime of war, the moral sublime).
Initially associated with the thrill of mountain summits in early Wordsworth – mountains as the
topographical core of the Romantic sublime (i.e., the sublime features of the alps)
Commentaries on the sublime reach back to the Greeks (Peri Hypsous, thought to be by
Longinus) – and reach through thinkers like Kant, Schiller, and Burke.
Romantic writers focus on the notion that certain aspects of the sublime style (grandeur of
thought together with intensity of passion) are dependent upon a nobility of soul or character.
(I.e., Wordsworth: the soul’s obscure sense / of possible sublimity, to which / With growing
faculties she doth aspire (The Prelude, II, 336-8). Also, the true sublimity of Milton….)
The modern sublime shifts away from the classical aesthetic emphasis on regularity and
harmony, to emphasize irregular, even chaotic forces.
The sublime escapes the limits of representation (esp. as observed by the merely picturesque)
and moves toward an esthetic of excess or non-representability.
Rejects Enlightenment clarity for the pleasurable/terrifying sense that all cannot be known
about a particular landscape – Romantic repudiation of the picturesque as middle class, in favor
of amorphous and moody sublime.
Sense that poetry is more emotive/subtle than visual representation, thus capable of raising the
passion of the sublime.
The sublime is associated with “masculine” qualities of strength and size (capable of evoking
admiration, awe or terror); the beautiful is associated with feminine qualities of smallness,
smoothness, and delicacy. Mary Wollstonecraft questions this gender alignment.
It is the idea of the thing (as opposed to the thing itself) that has the quality of the sublime – it’s
a mood or an approach rather than a scary thing. “Imagination”
The sublime has its roots in religion – i.e., the infinity of the sacred inspires the aspirant’s
reverence. Coleridge: “Where neither whole nor parts, but unity, as boundless or endless
allness – the Sublime” (Wittreich, pp. 252-3).

--From Trott, Nicola. “The Picturesque, the Beautiful, and the Sublime.” A Companion to
Romanticism. Malden, Mass: Blackwell Publishers, 1998: 72-90.

Notes from Edmund Burke’s Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime
and the Beautiful

“Whatever is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain and danger, that is to say whatever is in any
sort terrible, or is conversant about terrible objects, or operates in a manner analogous to terror, is a
source of the sublime; that is, it is productive of the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of
feeling” (499).

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“the torments which we may be made to suffer , are much greater in their effect on the body and
mind, than any pleasures which the most learned voluptuary could suggest, or than the liveliest
imagination, and the most sound and exquisitely sensible body, could enjoy” (599).

“When pain and danger press too nearby, they are incapable of giving any delight, and are simply
terrible; but at certain distances, and with certain modifications, they may be, and they are delightful,
as we every day experience” (500).

Sources of Sublime:

Passion caused by sublime in nature is most powerful; “astonishment” is the effect of the
sublime in the “highest degree.”
From Terror: fear “robs the mind of all its powers of acting and reasoning”; includes fear of
pain or death; whatever produces terror visually is sublime too.
From Obscurity: when we know and can see the danger clearly, much of our fear “vanishes”;
“dark, confused, uncertain images” found in nature produce obscurity.
From Power: “I know of nothing sublime which is not some modification of power”; if the
ability to hurt is removed from a man or animal, the sublime vanishes (ox and horse versus bull)
From Privation: “Vacuity, Darkness, Solitude, and Silence” “because they are terrible”
From Vastness: “Greatness of dimension is a powerful cause of the sublime”; rugged and
broken surfaces; looking down a precipice
From Infinity: “delightful horror”
From Difficulty: “greatness” of work (ex. Stonehenge)

Sources of the Beautiful:

Perfection not the cause of Beauty: pg. 503 How is the image of woman used here?
Beautiful Objects Small: in most languages “objects of love are spoken of under diminutive
epithets”
Smoothness: pg. 503, what examples does he use to illustrate this?
Gradual Variation: pg. 503, Female body
The Physical Cause of Love: See first sentence under this section. How is love, desire, and
beauty being constructed here?
How Words Influence Passions: words as expression of feeling from within artist

Questions:

How is the female body represented in Burke’s writing? Do you get the impression that the sublime is
gendered as masculine? If so, what are the implications of the binaries that Burke is describing?

How are elements of the sublime and the beautiful – and the gothic – present in Christabel and/or
other poems like Lines Writen Above Tintern Abbey?

Where do you see sexual imagery in Christabel – and how is this sexual imagery being used by
Coleridge?

In what ways is Christabel like the Albatross?

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Women writers: How is nature described in Mary Robinson’s "The Haunted Beach" (p. 221),
Charlotte Smith’s “Far on the Sands” (pg. 50-51) and Joanna Baillie’s “Thunder” (pp. 317-319)? Do
these poems draw upon the ideas of the sublime and/or the gothic? How do these female authors use
romantic conventions, in comparison with the male romantic writers we’ve read so far?

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