English 602: Reading the Gothic
Tim O’Connor
Notes and Quotes (20 July 2015)
David Putner and Glennis Byron, The Gothic (Blackwell Publishing, 2001)
Introduction (pg. xviii-xx)
-Genre defined by tropes/motifs
-Attempt to deal with social organization and/or human psyche
-Popular in times of social upheaval
Civilization and the Goths (pg. 3-5)
-Goths: German tribe, invaded Rome and established kingdoms in France, Italy
-Left no literature/art, “Gothic” came to describe all things medieval
-Barbarous, at odds w/ civilization
-Alternate association from Tacitus’ Germania: brave, virtuous, justice, liberty
Gothic in the Eighteenth Century (pg. 7-12)
-Shifts in meaning for “Gothic”:
-geographical->historical (“Dark Ages”/medieval)
-Anything at odds with “classical”
-Precipitated by a shift in cultural values: medieval, primitive, wild became valued in art, architecture,
literature
-Resisted established values and well-regulated society
-Primitivism and barbarism as a gateway to vigor and grandeur
-“Revival of the Gothic” built on four areas of past literature
1. Ancient British heritage
2. Ballads (Percy, Blake, Coleridge, P.B. Shelley)
3. Medieval poetry (Chaucer)
4. Elizabethan poetry (Spencer)
-Anticipated by early/mid 18th century “graveyard poetry” (similar themes and concerns, lacked the
tropes)
Gothic and Romantic (pg. 13-19)
-Gothic tropes/themes/“graveyard language” appeared in romantic works
-Blake: Social and political repercussions
-Vulnerable heroines, encounters with death
-Dungeons, chains, horrible power of the tyrant
-Coleridge: Personal psychological predicaments
-Ghosts of the past haunting the present (even if one knows the ghosts are figments)
-Pervasive feelings of guilt
-P.B. Shelley: “Gothic phantoms have a relation to earthly tyranny and injustice”
-Byron: “Aristocratic nostalgia” side by side w/ “political radicalism”
-Keats: Chivalry masking a different, darker world
***Science, Industry, and the Gothic (pg. 20-25)
-Gothic emerged alongside industrialism
-New types of work, ways of living, role for humanity
-Biological/material understanding of life disturbed notions that humans are unique (debate over “the life
principle”)
-Materialist view seen as ‘hostile to natural and revealed religion”
-Cities brought Gothic horror: winding streets, opium dens, filth and squalor
-Criminal anthropology: Burgeoning scientific classification of insanity, violent behavior, etc.
-Doctor Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
-Vampires and werewolves (“excessive development of the lateral incisors)
-Shift in lit. from external forces (vampires, werewolves, monsters) to chaos within the human mind
-The Turn of the Screw, “The Yellow Wallpaper”
th
-20 century shift to weaponization, artificial humans
-I Am Legend, Wetware
“Where the classical was well ordered, the Gothic was chaotic; where the classical was simple and pure,
Gothic was ornate and convoluted; where the classics offered a world of clear rules and limits, Gothic
represented excess and exaggeration, the product of the wild and the uncivilized, a world that constantly
tended to overflow cultural boundaries” (pg. 7).
-Victor’s education/experiment crosses the lines established in a classical scientific approach with
“rule and limits”
-M. Waldman’s concept of contemporary scientific achievement, that science “promise[s] very
little” is a “simple and pure” form of achievement; Victor is obsessed with the “promised
impossibilities” of the past must “overflow” these cultural/intellectual “boundaries” (Shelley 29).
-The “wild and uncivilized’ is embodied more in Victor than the creature himself; ironically, the
creature attempts to establish himself very much within the traditional boundaries of civilization
“As Britain changed…into an industrial society…the traditional social system collapsed as new types of
work and new social roles were established. Emergent capitalism led to a growing sense of isolation and
alienation, an increasing mechanization divorced workers from the products of their labor, and urban
centres disconnected them from the natural world. The very ideas of what it meant to be human were
disturbed in the face of increasing regimentation and mechanistic roles” (pg. 20).
-Capture the social context and anxieties surrounding Shelley as she wrote Frankenstein
-The creature literalizes the idea of the human as an “automaton manufactured from fragments.”
-Sociological component to Victor’s horror: face to face with what humanity is becoming?
“I saw how the fine form of man was degraded and wasted; I beheld the corruption of death succeed to
the blooming cheek of life; I saw how the worm inherited the wonders of the eye and brain. I paused,
examining and analyzing all the minutiae of causation, as exemplified in the change from life to death,
and death to life” (Shelley 32).
-Obsession with the line between “life and death”
-Callous, scientific attitude towards the “waste” and “corruption” of the human body
-Emphasis on the parts, i.e. “the eye and brain”