When you think of the term “Gothic,” I’m willing to bet that a very specific image comes to mind: an ancient, ruined castle. Perhaps it is shrouded in mist. Perhaps there is a single light in a window high up in the structure. Perhaps there is a woman fleeing in the night. Usually in her nightgown, however impractical such a thing might be.
While the ruined castle is the most common trope in Gothic literature, it is certainly not the only one. Over and over in such narratives, one runs across
• An ancient/old/abandoned/creepy house or castle
• Pervasive mood of gloom and dread in the language (in this, the house personifies the mood)
• Isolation
• Liminality and madness – questions of what is real versus what is imaginary, are people/things alive or dead?
• The constant presence of threat, either supernatural or appearing to be supernatural
• Doubling – twins, lookalikes, mirrors
• Incest/swapped children/illegitimacy/inheritance
• Orphans and dead families in general
• Claustrophobic writing (frequent crypts)
• Religion (often, religious figures are portrayed as evil)
Looking at that list, you might think “how could a genre so filled with unpleasantness possibly survive?” But survive it has. In fact, it has thrived, for nearly 300 years. Many of the foundational tropes seem overblown to a modern reader, but several of them would have resonated in a completely different way with an audience in both Britain and Europe, who’d seen a “divinely anointed” King beheaded in 1649.
Previous to that, the Divine Right of Kings was almost unquestioned, and it wasn’t as if simply executing a king quelled the royalists who believed Charles to have been their anointed leader. Even those who believed they’d been right in executing Charles could not deny the condemnation it brought from all corners of Europe. And given that “nature abhors a vacuum,” it is no surprise that no sooner was the throne empty that squabbles (and wars) arose about who would next get to sit there—which gives the modern reader some sense of why inheritance, legitimacy, religion, and constant uneasiness show up in so much work of the mid-17th Century on.
The first acknowledged gothic novel written in English was The Castle of Otranto by Horace Walpole, published in 1764. Walpole himself seems to have ambiguous feelings about the work, as he first claimed it was a recovered manuscript, translated from the Italian, written in 1529. The story itself, he claimed in the person of the “translator,” appeared to go back to the Crusades.
In the second edition, where he titled it “a gothic story,” he acknowledged that he wrote it. The first edition received critical praise while the second edition was panned, likely because the very same elements that the reviewers found intriguing in when written in the 11th C (see list above with the additions of divorce, bigamy, and rape) were repulsive or immoral to them in a contemporary story. Especially since Walpole also claimed that it was all a big joke, a satire, and they’d all been fooled. Which says rather more about the critics than about the story, IMHO.
To read much about Walpole is to know that it is possible the whole thing was a giant hoax to him (he was fond of poking fun at his contemporaries), but that he was also serious about those few things to which he applied himself. One cannot imagine that he intended the novel to be dismissed so easily. Rather, it is the finest type of satire, a perfect paean to what is being satirized, so well-done as to function both as satire and as its own object.
A short thirty years later, in 1794, Ann Radcliffe published the first gothic romance, The Mysteries of Udolfo. It contained all the foundational tropes, along with fear of the foreign. The heroine and her allies are pursued by evil Italians and Frenchmen. But in the end, this is a romance, and she and her lover are united.
In 1818, Mary Shelley added her own touch to the genre and became known as the first author of horror. Despite the shambling monster in Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus, this is still a gothic. After all, at the heart of the novel is the question of what it means to be alive and to be sane. Is the monster truly alive? Can anyone who decides to stitch together dead bodies and try to bring the product to life sane? There’s the ancient building, the liminality of all the characters, who are outcasts from society.
As a past president of the NY chapter of the Mystery Writers of America, I cannot let any discussion of the gothic go without mentioning Edgar Allan Poe’s The Fall of the House of Usher. Published in 1839, it hits every single gothic trope.
• An unnamed narrator about whom we know virtually nothing. Nothing outside the story at all, really.
• Creepy place: Ancient, mysterious house, fully equipped with a crypt and a mysterious crack that runs down the side, though it doesn’t seem to be affecting the stability of the building
• Isolation: The house is isolated, but so is Roderick Usher. His sister Madeline drifts through in a ghostly moment, but is not properly seen until she may be dead, and there are no servants about.
• Liminality and madness & the constant presence of threat: Nothing is real, the entire place seems to exist within a dream. The narrator talks about his own increasing discomfort as well as Roderick’s, but with no known cause. And Madeline—is she alive or is she dead?
• Doubling: Roderick’s sister is his twin and the narrator remarks on this. Both sicken at the same time and continue to worsen through the narrative.
• Incest/swapped children/illegitimacy: The relationship between Roderick and his sister is peculiar. Is it incestuous? Hard to tell. Certainly, neither of them is particularly interested in outside relationships and Roderick’s invitation to his old school friend is more akin to that from one who fears a spouse’s death than one who fears a sibling’s death. Still, even if we only stick to their relationship being that of unusually close twins, the relationship is odd and lends an unsavory edge to the narrative. Roderick knows that he is the last of his line. Roderick tells the narrator that he believes the house itself (much like Shirley Jackson’s Hill House) is responsible for dooming them, though he does not explain why it should want to visit this doom upon his particular generation.
• Orphans/dead families: The once-great House of Usher has come to the end of its line
• Pervasive mood of gloom and dread: well, yes.
• Claustrophobic setting and writing: the narrative gets smaller and smaller, beginning outside, when there is still a chance of “escape” as it were, right down into the crypt and then into Roderick’s bedroom.
At the end, the House of Usher falls literally as well as figuratively. It splits in two along the seemingly innocent crack the narrator noticed upon his arrival.
There are a host of novels, novellas, and short stories that follow before the end of the 19th Century. I am not going to say much about them, but I am going to mention several in case you’re interested.
1847: Both Jane Eyre (Charlotte Brontë) and Wuthering Heights (Emily Brontë)
1859: The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins – misses some of the tropes, but hits the mood, the questions of sanity and reality. This is sometimes called the first true mystery novel.
1886: The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson – the doubling in this could not be more obvious
1891: The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde
1897: Dracula by Bram Stoker
1898: The Turn of the Screw by Henry James – takes questions of reality to whole new levels
1938: Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier – never, in my presence, refer to this as a gothic romance. It is a straight-up gothic. Anyone who believes there’s a happy ending has a very strange idea of happiness.
1959: The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson (or, really anything she wrote. We Have Always Lived in the Castle is another favorite.)
In the 1960s, the popularity of the modern pulp “gothic romance” exploded. Every major publisher had an imprint devoted to them. If you want to get a taste, you can still buy the most popular of these in ebook form. True, the genre got up a bit for modern audiences, with less incest and fewer religious figures (who, after all, no longer carried the same resonances). Check out Mary Stewart, Victoria Holt, or Phyllis A. Whitney for a taste of what made these novels so appealing to readers.
The heroines, because they were all heroines, found themselves in situations readers recognized. In the America of the 1950s, women could not open bank accounts without men’s aid. They couldn’t get credit cards. Their work was undervalued. They lived on the edges of society, trying to survive without a safety net. Dependent on the good will of others, they recognized the desperation of the heroines.
At some point, the term “gothic” fell out of use and was replaced with “domestic suspense.” Domestic suspense often has even less incest, and religion than the gothic romance pulps of the mid-20th Century. But the claustrophobia, doom, doubling and isolation remain.
And, if I am lucky, they always will.