The Gothic: A Very Short Introduction by Nick Groom

Author:Nick Groom [Groom, Nick]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780199586790
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2012-12-15T06:00:00+00:00

Chapter 8

The descent into hell

Whether the poetic laurels (or perhaps ivy) should go to Walpole or to Leland for instigating the Gothic fiction, the effect was electric. The next century and a half saw a huge proliferation of Gothic novels, from the florid narratives of Ann Radcliffe to cheaply produced ‘shilling shockers’. These works appealed particularly to the emerging markets of lower middle-class and female readerships who if they could not afford to purchase them could borrow the books from circulating libraries. The style was probably at the height of its popularity and innovation around 1810; thereafter it became increasingly sophisticated, producing such literary classics as Frankenstein (1818), Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886), and Dracula (1897). At the time, these books were known as ‘romances’, the ‘German’ style, ‘novels addressed to the strong passions of wonder and terrour’, ‘hogoblin romance’, ‘hogobliana’, or, as Jane Austen put it in Northanger Abbey, ‘horrid’ novels—the term ‘Gothic novel’ was not used until the 1920s.

Whatever it was called, the style was however instantly recognizable and frequently parodied. An article on ‘Terrorist Novel Writing’ published in 1798, for example, gave a recipe for making a Gothic novel:

Take—An old castle, half of it ruinous.

A long gallery, with a great many doors, some secret ones.

Three murdered bodies, quite fresh.

As many skeletons, in chests and presses.

An old woman hanging by the neck; with her throat cut.

Assassins and desperadoes ‘quant suff.’

Noise, whispers, and groans, threescore at least.

Mix them together, in the form of three volumes to be taken at any

of the watering places, before going to bed.

The crucial activity of the Gothic imagination was seen as inspiring terror and power, which was accomplished by creating sublime effects based on Burke’s Philosophical Enquiry. The sublime signals the limits of rationality—the ‘sleep’ of reason—and was best communicated by obscurity. So in the same spirit as the recipes ‘to make a romance’, ‘seven types of obscurity’ could be proposed for a Gothic novel:

1. meteorological (mists, clouds, wind, rain, storm, tempest, smoke, darkness, shadows, gloom);

2. topographical (impenetrable forests, inaccessible mountains, chasms, gorges, deserts, blasted heaths, icefields, the boundless ocean);

3. architectural (towers, prisons, castles covered in gargoyles and crenellations, abbeys and priories, tombs, crypts, dungeons, ruins, graveyards, mazes, secret passages, locked doors) (see Figure 7);

4. material (masks, veils, disguises, billowing curtains, suits of armour, tapestries);

5. textual (riddles, rumours, folklore, unreadable manuscripts and inscriptions, ellipses, broken texts, fragments, clotted language, polysyllabism, obscure dialect, inserted narratives, stories-within-stories);

6. spiritual (religious mystery, allegory and symbolism, Roman Catholic ritual, mysticism, freemasonry, magic and the occult, Satanism, witchcraft, summonings, damnation);

7. psychological (dreams, visions, hallucinations, drugs, sleepwalking, madness, split personalities, mistaken identities, doubles, derangement, ghostly presences, forgetfulness, death, hauntings).

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