14

GOTHIC AND MÄRCHEN

Gothic and Märchen are closely related: Gothic is constructed on the basis of
the morphology of the folk fairytale. Gothic writers borrow extensively
from the fairytale formula, often subverting it in the process. Great literature
of all ages has, of course, ‘borrowed [...] fairy-tale motifs and often exhibited
an imaginativeness not unlike that of the fairy tale’,1 and while most Gothic
fiction is not ‘great literature’ by any stretch of the imagination, a small
portion of it is, and Gothic, as a kind of fictional Night Piece, is heavily
involved in borrowing from the Nights of the Eastern (Arabian Nights) and
Western (the Piacevolissime Notti of Straparola) fairytale canons. The
distinguished German Gothic novelist, Benedicte Naubert, published
sizeable collections of tales from both canons, and a number of Gothic
novelists, or writers like Goethe, who have been associated with Gothic,
borrowed from fairytale in ways which reflect an affinity between these two
formulaic genres that are closely related in terms of their history, machinery,
personae, formulae and functions, and by their deployment of motifs
ranging from subversion to the counterfeit. In brief, the building blocks or
‘functions’ of the two forms are much the same The fairytale novels of the
Great Enchantress, Ann Radcliffe, are a case in point, as are those of
Benedicte Naubert, part of the inspiration for which goes back to the
Tausend und eine Nacht; her collection of ‘Egyptian fairytales’, Alme oder
Egyptische Mährchen (1793-97), shows that she, like Goethe, grew up with
Galland.
This chapter considers the impact of the Arabian Nights, that important
link between Gothic and fairytale, on the work of Goethe and Hoffmann in
particular, with De Quincey pointing to a third way, and then of French
fairytale on the work of Walpole, Naubert, Tieck and others. After
considering the relationship between the tales of the Brothers Grimm and
Gothic, the parallels and divergencies between Gothic and fairytale are
explored in more general terms, from which it will be seen that the two
genres are linked not only by similar clusters of motifs, but by the fact that
the motifs in question are strung along a similar structural thread. A
generation of criticism ago Hannelotte Dorner Bachmann showed,2 taking

1 Lüthi, Once upon a Time.On the Nature of Fairy Tales (New York: Frederick Ungar,
1970), 21.
2 Hannelotte Dorner-Bachmann, Erzählstruktur und Texttheorie. Zu den Grundlagen einer
Erzähltheorie unter besonderer Berücksichtigung des Märchens und der Gothic Novel
(Hildesheim: Olms, 1979), esp. 357, 359, 396. Dorner-Bachmann was elaborating, in
overwhelming detail, Ilse Nolting-Hauff’s statement that ‘Der eigentliche Prototyp
542 The German Gothic Novel in Anglo-German Perspective

The Castle of Otranto, The Italian and The Monk as models, just how closely
Gothic and fairytale are related in structural terms. Whether approached
from a detailed structural point of view, or from a general literary historical
one, the Gothic romance is, by its very nature, a kind of Märchenroman
(fairytale novel), which is in turn a kind of Kunstmärchen.

Fairytale and Gothic both go back to The Golden Ass, but it is appropriate, in
view of the influence of the Arabian Nights on the Western fairytale from the
early eighteenth century onwards, that the fairytale genre appears to have
originated in ancient Egypt. The earliest proto-fairytale, ‘The Doomed
Prince’, goes back to the ancient Egypt of 1350 BC, although it was not
written down until c. 1000 BC. In c.1250 BC a tale of two brothers, Anup
and Bata, recorded on papyrus, included some of what subsequently became
the most popular folk-fairytale motifs.3 On the northern side of the
Mediterranean fairytale motifs are found in the work of Homer (8th century
BC), and elements of fairytale proper go back at least as far as Plato (c.428-
c.348 BC) who wrote in his Gorgias of ‘old wives tales’4 being told to amuse
and/or chasten children. The fairytale as such, an early type of moral tale,
appears to have developed over a long period of time from oral folktales
that were intended to still the existential terror to which the human animal
has always been subject, on which Gothic writing plays. There is, then, every
reason to suppose that the main types of fairytale go back at least to classical
antiquity, surviving by oral transmission until the didactically minded middle
ages, when they began to enter the literary canon.
Elements of what we call Gothic also go back to the ancient world:
Horace (65 BC-8 BC), in asking in his Epistles, ‘Somnia, terrores magicos,
miracula, sagas, / Nocturnos lemures, portentaque Thessala rides?’ (Is it
really by laughter that you respond to dreams, irrational fears, wonders,
soothsayers, spectres that walk by night, and Thessalonian prodigies?), was
clearly pointing to the realm that is now known as the Gothic. Edith

des neueren Märchenromans is [...] der Schauerroman’ (see Ilse Nolting-Hauff,

‘Märchen und Märchenroman’ and ‘Märchenromane mit leidendem Helden’, in
Poetica, 6 (1974), 133f, 452-5).
3 Details in Max Lüthi, Märchen, 9th edn, ed. Heinz Rölleke (Stuttgart & Weimar :
Metzler,1996), 40. The type stretches via the Biblical Cain and Abel to Karl and
Franz Moor and their successors and clones.
4 That there is overlap between myth and fairytale is shown by the fact that Greek
mythos means ‘tale’, while mythos graos means ‘old wives tale’ and therefore ‘fairytale’.