James Ward, Gordale Scar, 1814,
London, Tate Gallery
Raffaella Mannori classi 5° 2015-2016
THE
GOTHIC
SETTING
THE
ORIGIN OF
THE NAME
FIRST
GOTHIC
AUTHORS
The
language
VICTORIAN
GOTHIC
CHARACTERS
James Ward, Gordale Scar, 1814,
London, Tate Gallery
Raffaella Mannori classi 5° 2015-2016
It came to popularity at the end of the 18th century
The adjective ‘Gothic’
three connotations
Medieval, linked
to the architecture
of the 12th-14th
centuries
Irregular,
barbarous,
opposed to
Classicism
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Wild, supernatural,
in the sense of
mysterious
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Industrial exploitation
The 18th-century
society
•
Destruction of the single human being.
•
Man as a slave to forces he could
•
not control.
•
Gothic symbols as denunciation of
social problems.
The ‘sublime’
•
As a celebration of terror.
•
As a rejection of constraints and
limits.
•
As exploration of forbidden areas.
7 ottobre 2015
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3. The Gothic setting

Great importance given to
terror, characterised by
obscurity and uncertainty, and
horror, caused by evil and
atrocity.
Night & Darkness, necessary
ingredients for the mysterious,
gloomy and oppressive
atmosphere.
 ANCIENT SETTINGS , like
isolated castles, mysterious
abbeys and convents.

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




Characters dominated by exaggerated
reactions in front of mysterious
situations or events.
Supernatural beings: vampires,
monsters and ghosts.
Sensitive heroes: they save heroines.
Heroines dominated by exaggerated
passions and by fear of imprisonment,
rape and personal violation , stricken by
unreal terrors and persecuted by the
villains
VILLAINS = Satanic, terrifying male
characters, victims of their negative
impulses
Raffaella Mannori classi 5° 2015-2016
Henry Fuseli (Johann Heinrich Füssli),
The Nightmare, 1781, Goethe Museum,
Frankfurt
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The Gothic novel
Gothic writers chose vocabulary that referred to emotions and
feelings, capable of evoking anxiety, fear or horror.
Semantic areas
Words
Mystery
enchantment, ghost, haunted, infernal, magic, secret, spectre,
vision
Fear / Terror /
Sorrow
agony, anguish, apprehensions, despair, dread, fearing,
frightened, hopeless, horror, melancholy, miserable, panic,
sadly, scared, shrieks, sorrow, tears, terror, unhappy,
wretched
Haste
anxious, breathless, frantic, hastily, impatient, running,
suddenly
Anger
anger, enraged, furious, rage, resentment, wrath
Largeness
enormous, gigantic, large, tremendous, vast
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Raffaella Mannori classi 5° 2015-2016
 Horace
Walpole  The Castle of Otranto
(1764)
 Ann Radcliffe  The Mysteries of Udolpho
(1794)
 Matthew Lewis The Monk (1796)
 Mary Shelley Frankenstein (1818)
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 Matthew
Lewis The Monk (1796)

The story concerns Ambrosio - a pious, well-respected monk in Spain - and
his violent downfall. He is undone by carnal lust for his pupil, a woman
disguised as a monk (Matilda), who tempts him to transgress, and, once
satisfied by her, is overcome with desire for the innocent Antonia.

Using magic spells Matilda aids him in seducing Antonia, whom he later
rapes and kills. Matilda is eventually revealed as an instrument of Satan in
female form, who has orchestrated Ambrosio's downfall from the start.

In the middle of telling this story Lewis frequently makes further
digressions, which serve to heighten the Gothic atmosphere of the tale. A
lengthy story about a "Bleeding Nun" is told and a second romance, between
Lorenzo and Antonia, also gives way to a tale of Lorenzo's sister being
tortured by hypocritical nuns . Eventually, the story catches back up with
Ambrosio, and in several pages of impassioned prose, Ambrosio is delivered
into the hands of the Inquisition; he escapes by selling his soul to the
devil for his deliverance from the death sentence which awaits him. The
story ends with the devil preventing Ambrosio's attempted final
repentance, and the sinful monk's prolonged torturous death. Ambrosio
finds out by the devil that the woman that he had raped and killed, Antonia,
was indeed his sister.
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
Horace Walpole  The Castle of Otranto (1764) The Castle of
Otranto tells the story of Manfred, lord of the castle, and his
family. The book begins on the wedding-day of his sickly son
Conrad and princess Isabella. Shortly before the wedding,
however, Conrad is crushed to death by a gigantic helmet
that falls on him from above. This inexplicable event is
particularly ominous in light of an ancient prophecy .
Manfred, terrified that Conrad's death signals the beginning of
the end for his line, resolves to avert destruction by marrying
Isabella himself while divorcing his current wife Hippolita, who
he feels has failed to bear him a proper heir. However, Manfred's
attempts at a second union are disrupted by a series of
supernatural events involving the appearance of numerous
oversized artifacts and body-parts as well as the arrival of the
true prince, Theodore of Falconara
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
The influence of Byronic Romanticism is also apparent in the work of the
Brontë sisters.

Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights (1847) transports the Gothic to the
forbidding Yorkshire Moors and features ghostly apparitions and a
Byronic hero in the person of the demonic Heathcliff whilst Charlotte
Brontë's Jane Eyre (1847) adds the madwoman in the attic to the cast of
gothic fiction. The Brontës' fiction is seen by some feminist critics as
prime examples of Female Gothic, exploring woman's entrapment within
domestic space and subjection to patriarchal authority and the
transgressive and dangerous attempts to subvert and escape such
restriction. Charlotte's Jane Eyre and Emily's Cathy are both examples of
female protagonists in such a role.

The 1880s, saw the revival of the Gothic as a powerful literary form allied
to "fin de siecle" decadence.Classic works of this Urban Gothic include
Robert Louis Stevenson's Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886),
Oscar Wilde'sThe Picture of Dorian Gray (1891).The most famous gothic
villain ever, Count Dracula was created by Bram Stoker in his novel
Dracula (1897). Stoker's book also established Transylvania and Eastern
Europe as the locus classicus of the Gothic -
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