ENGL 602: The Gothic
Nixon
Allison Christiansen
David Stevens –The Gothic Tradition
Ch. 1 Approaching the gothic tradition
Stevens’s approach is to place the Gothic in its social, political, and cultural context.
The historical Gothic
-The Goths were members of Germanic tribes who invaded the Roman Empire and came to represent
Germans in general. Mythically, in the English imagination, they stood for freedom and liberty for some,
while it represented tradition and hierarchy for others. “For the 18th century reader, it was an almost
unpredictable intersection of religious belief, of aesthetic taste and political inclination” (9). In literature,
the Gothic period referred to the Middle Ages and established a medieval setting.
Definition of the Gothic
-both ambiguous and ambivalent, the Gothic favored feelings and sensibility over reason and rationality.
Gothic taste
-also expressed in art, architecture, and landscaping, where it stood in opposition to neo-classical values.
Types of the Gothic
Art-examples Goya and Blake
Architecture-architect William Kent, writer Horace Walpole and Strawberry Hill, William Beckford and
Fonthill Abbey
Poetry-graveyard poets Edward Young, Robert Blair
Political context
The French Revolution, rivalry between the growing middle class, the laboring classes (proletariat), and
the declining aristocracy
Rousseau, Thomas Paine, William Godwin, Mary Wollstonecraft, and Edmund Burke
“The representation of revolutionary ideas and emotions and their subsequent containment within a
conservative structure is one way of looking at and interpreting the nature of the gothic” (17).
Spiritual context
A “period of spiritual transition”(19) with challenges to Christianity, the Enlightenment, and a reaction
wave of belief in the supernatural.
Coleridge
-The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
-Christabel
Faith (Roman Catholic) versus education
The question of nature versus nurture
Cultural context
Gothic expression in literature.
Novel –new form of literature, connected to female readership & authorship, partnered also with the
Gothic romance.
Writers Ann Radcliff, Mary Shelley, Jane Austen, and Emily Brontë.
The distinction between novel, which is realistic, and romance which contains fantasy or supernatural ,
derived from the medieval.
“Eventually, the novel was able to develop as a literary form through a creative synthesis of both
romance and realism; by the time Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein in 1818, she was able to describe
outlandish, gothic events in the context of a chilling, compelling realism” (24).
Gothic genres
-poetry and drama
Poems often included in Gothic novels, popularity of Gothic plays and dramatizations of Gothic novels,
such as Frankenstein and Dracula.
Dissemination of Gothic literature- circulating libraries-e.g. Minerva Press
Key authors:
Mathew Lewis- The Monk, William Beckford- Vathek, Mary Shelley- Frankenstein, Ann Radcliffe-The
Mysteries of Udolpho & The Italian.
Elements of the Gothic text
Gothic fascination with the past.
The Gothic ballad-e.g. Coleridge’s “Christabel,” & “The Rime of Ancient Mariner,” Keats’s “La Belle Dame
Sans Merci”
Gothic Shakespeare-Hamlet, Macbeth, Romeo and Juliet,.
The sublime and supernatural in the Gothic.
Supernatural –considered ghostly, or as something beyond nature or human experience.
The sublime, described in Edmund Burke’s A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the
Sublime and Beautiful, as representing an “almighty power…invested on every side with omnipresence”
which causes man to “shrink into the minuteness of our own nature” (50). The sublime inspires feelings
of awe and horror.
Examples of sublime elements abound in Frankenstein, where Victor and the reader are instilled with an
perception of insignificance, feeling small and overwhelmed by the enormity and majesty of nature. This
emotion compares to what is felt when a human is confronted by the stature size of the creature.
In the following passage, Victor Frankenstein travels to Chamounix and experiences the sublime effects
of Mont Blanc.
“I spent the following day roaming through the valley. I stood beside the sources of the Arveiron, which
take their rise in a glacier, that with slow pace is advancing down from the summit of the hills to
barricade the valley. The abrupt sides of vast mountains were before me; the icy wall of the glacier
overhung me; a few shattered pines were scattered around; and the solemn silence of this glorious
presence-chamber of imperial nature was broken only by the brawling waves or the fall of some vast
fragment, the thunder sound of the avalanche or the cracking, reverberated along the mountains, of the
accumulated ice, which, through the silent working of immutable laws, was ever and anon rent and torn,
as if it had been but a plaything in their hands. These sublime and magnificent scenes afforded me the
greatest consolation that I was capable of receiving” (Frankenstein 102).