The Literature of Terror: Volume 1

The Gothic Tradition

David Punter

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317891970
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Letteratura
• Subtopic: Critica letteraria

The first edition was regarded as the definitive survey of Gothic and related terror writing in English. No other text considers this genre on such a scale and covers the theoretical perspectives so comprehensively. In the latest edition, the broad range of theoretical perspectives has been enlarged to include modern critical theories. Volume One is a thoroughly updated edition of the original text, covering the period from 1765 up to the Edwardian age, exploring the richness and literary diversity of the gothic form: from the original eighteenth-century gothic of Ann Radcliffe to the melodramatic fiction of Wilkie Collins.

Chapter 1 Introductory Dimensions of Gothic

DOI: 10.4324/9781315843476-1

In a book on Gothic fictions, it seems reasonable to begin with a brief examination of the word ‘Gothic’ itself. It is a word which has, even now, a wide variety of meanings, and which has had in the past even more. It is used in a number of different fields: as a literary term, as a historical term, as an artistic term, as an architectural term. And as a literary term in contemporary usage, it has a range of different applications.

In a literary context, ‘Gothic’ is most usually applied to a group of novels written between the 1760s and the 1820s. Their authors are now, with few exceptions, not the object of much critical attention, although some names still stand out: Horace Walpole, Ann Radcliffe, Matthew Lewis, C. R. Maturin, Mary Shelley. As we shall see, there are important differences between the better-known Gothic novels; nonetheless, literary history has tended to group them together into a homogeneous body of fiction. When thinking of the Gothic novel, a set of characteristics springs readily to mind: an emphasis on portraying the terrifying, a common insistence on archaic settings, a prominent use of the supernatural, the presence of highly stereotyped characters and the attempt to deploy and perfect techniques of literary suspense are the most significant. Used in this sense, ‘Gothic’ fiction is the fiction of the haunted castle, of heroines preyed on by unspeakable terrors, of the blackly lowering villain, of ghosts, vampires, monsters and werewolves.

And indeed, if this were the only literary meaning of Gothic, the term would be reasonably easy to describe and define. But it is not: over the last two centuries, it has acquired a number of other usages, some of them apparently only tangentially related to the ‘original Gothic’, and it is now a term which crops up continually both in academic discourse and also in more popular reviews of fiction. For instance, ‘Gothic’ is the term which publishers still use to sell a particular genre of paperback historical romance. The genre can be conveniently identified from the blurb on the back of The Spectral Bride by ‘Margaret Campbell’, published by Sphere as a ‘QueenSize Gothic’:

James Daintry, Lord Manton, was the heir of a noble line. And like his father before him he brooded on the ancient crime that marred so hideously his family’s history. It was said that the ghost of the murdered Harriet Bond haunted the grave, seeking revenge, seeking to become James’s spectral bride. The arrival of the lovely young Adelaide Fenton and her sister Caroline drew James from his brooding, until a vengeful ghost arose to possess the young lord in search of awful justice for an ancient crime.

Inside the covers is a turgidly-written medley of slightly perverse romance and tame supernaturalism, a Woman’s Own story set precariously in the 1870s. The elements which seem most universal in the genre are the apparent presence of a ghost, often finally explained away by non-supernatural means; the very real presence of one or more members of the aristocracy, with castles and other props to match; and a dominant love-plot, generally set in the past but with very little attempt at real historical distancing beyond, perhaps, occasional vocabulary and sometimes the interpolation of references to actual historical events. The novels show the marks of being written for a largely captive audience: the same themes are repeated with only the slightest of variations, and assumptions are frequently made which point to a readership already thoroughly familiar with a certain set of narrative and stylistic conventions.

And there are other contemporary uses of the term ‘Gothic’: a cardinal example is its reappearance as a description of a certain kind of American fiction of which the main practitioners are usually taken to be James Purdy, Joyce Carol Oates, John Hawkes and Flannery O’Connor. At first glance, it is not easy to see what these writers have in common, but what the critics seem to have in mind is a literature of psychic grotesquerie. This ‘New American Gothic’ is said to deal in landscapes of the mind, settings which are distorted by the pressure of the principal characters’ psychological obsessions. We are given little or no access to an ‘objective’ world; instead we are immersed in the psyche of the protagonist, often through sophisticated use of first-person narrative. It may or may not be coincidence that writers and settings alike have connections with the American South; in one way or another, feelings of degeneracy abound. The worlds portrayed are ones infested with psychic and social decay, and coloured with the heightened hues of putrescence. Violence, rape and breakdown are the key motifs; the crucial tone is one of desensitised acquiescence in the horror of obsession and prevalent insanity.

And ‘Gothic’ is also used in a less tendentious sense to refer to horror fiction itself, in the common form of the ghost story. Here there is a clear historical element in the usage: many of the best-known masters of supernatural fiction – Algernon Blackwood, M. R. James, H. R Lovecraft – derive their techniques of suspense and their sense of the archaic directly from the original Gothic fiction, and many of their crucial symbols of the supernatural were previously the property of these older writers. This is not, of course, to say that all twentieth-century horror fiction has its roots in the Gothic: but it is remarkable how much of it does, how much it relies on themes and styles which, by rights, would seem to be more than a century out of date.

A crucial example here, and one to which we shall return, is the horror film. These, clearly, come in all shapes and sizes, but several of the major sub-genres – for instance, the American films of the 1930s and the products of England’s Hammer Studios – deal constantly in settings and characters taken from the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The reasons for this are difficult to see: there are many films of terror, Alfred Hitchcock’s and Roman Polanski’s among them, which ably demonstrate that fear is at its fiercest when it is seen to invade the everyday contemporary world, yet alongside these films Hammer has turned out further versions of the staple Gothic fictions, with every appearance of continuing commercial success.

And then again, there are many contemporary and near-contemporary writers who have nothing to do with any of these genres, and yet who in one way or another regard themselves as personally indebted to the Gothic tradition. One of the most notable was Mervyn Peake, who created in his Gormenghast trilogy (1946–59) a fantasy world entirely out of the elements of early Gothic fiction.

The while, beneath the downpour and the sunbeams, the Castle hollow as a tongueless bell, its corroded shell dripping or gleaming with the ephemeral weather, arose in immemorial defiance of the changing airs, and skies. … Stone after grey stone climbed. Windows yawned: shields, scrolls, and legendary mottoes, melancholy in their ruin, protruded in worn relief over arches or doorways; along the sills of casements, in the walls of towers or carved in buttresses. Storm-nibbled heads, their shallow faces striated with bad green and draped with creepers, stared blindly through the four quarters, from between broken eyelids.

Stone after grey stone; and a sense of the heaving skywards of great blocks, one upon another in a climbing weight, ponderous and yet alive with the labour of dead days.¹

The resonances here force us back to the castles of Ann Radcliffe and Matthew Lewis, to the angry and potent ruins from which the first Gothic novelists built their literary dreams and nightmares. Another type of interpretation of Gothic is suggested by Angela Carter in the Afterword to her collection of tales, Fireworks (1974), where she discusses her own debt to the ‘Gothic tradition’ as represented by Edgar Allan Poe and E. T. A. Hoffmann:

The Gothic tradition in which Poe writes grandly ignores the value systems of our institutions; it deals entirely with the profane. Its great themes are incest and cannibalism. Character and events are exaggerated beyond reality, to become symbols, ideas, passions. Its style will tend to be ornate, unnatural – and thus operate against the perennial human desire to believe the word as fact. Its only humour is black humour. It retains a singular moral function – that of provoking unease.²

A particular attitude towards the recapture of history; a particular kind of literary style; a version of self-conscious un-realism; a mode of revealing the unconscious; connections with the primitive, the barbaric, the tabooed – all of these meanings have attached themselves in one way or another to the idea of Gothic fiction, and our present apprehension of the term is usually an uneasy concatenation of them, in which there is a complicated interplay of direct historical connections and ever variable metaphor.

To see the reasons for this flexibility, we have, however, to look back beyond Gothic fiction and into the history of the word ‘Gothic’ itself, which is not of course exclusively or even primarily a literary term; we need particularly to mention a set of cultural and linguistic changes during the eighteenth century which largely conditioned later uses of the word. The original meaning, not unnaturally, was literally ‘to do with the Goths’, or with the barbarian northern tribes who played so somewhat unfairly reviled a part in the collapse of the Roman empire, although even this apparently literal meaning was less simple than it appears, because the seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century writers who used the term in this sense had very little idea of who the Goths were or what they were like. One thing that was known was that they came from northern Europe, and thus the term had a tendency to broaden out, to become virtually a synonym for ‘Teutonic’ or ‘Germanic’, while retaining its connotations of barbarity.

During the course of the eighteenth century, however, this was to change. In the first place, less weight came to be placed on the geographical significance of the word and correspondingly more on the historical. Here again the problem occurred that very little was known about the history of the Dark Ages, or even about medieval history; it is well known that the eighteenth century possessed a somewhat foreshortened sense of past chronology, and from being a term suggestive of more or less unknown features of the Dark Ages, ‘Gothic’ became descriptive of things medieval – in fact, of all things preceding about the middle of the seventeenth century. Another connotation naturally accompanied this: if ‘Gothic’ meant to do with post-Roman barbarism and to do with the medieval world, it followed that it was a term which could be used in opposition to ‘classical’. Where the classical was well-ordered, the Gothic was chaotic; where simple and pure, Gothic was ornate and convoluted; where the classics offered a set of cultural models to be followed, Gothic represented excess and exaggeration, the product of the wild and the uncivilised.

These extensions in meaning have a perceptible logic; but what started to happen in the middle of the eighteenth century had more to do with a shift in cultural values. For while the word ‘Gothic’ retained this stock of meanings, the value placed upon them began to alter radically. It is not possible to put a precise date on this change, but it was one of huge dimensions which affected whole areas of eighteenth-century culture – architectural, artistic and literary; for what happened was that the medieval, the primitive, the wild, became invested with positive value in and for itself.

Gothic stood for the old-fashioned as opposed to the modern; the barbaric as opposed to the civilised; crudity as opposed to elegance; old English barons as opposed to the cosmopolitan gentry; indeed, often for the English and provincial as opposed to the European or Frenchified. Gothic was the archaic, the pagan, that which was prior to, or was opposed to, or resisted the establishment of civilised values and a well-regulated society. And various writers, starting from this point, began to make out a case for the importance of these Gothic qualities and to claim, specifically, that the fruits of primitivism and barbarism possessed a fire, a vigour, a sense of grandeur which was sorely needed in English culture. Furthermore, they began to argue that there were whole areas of English cultural history which were being ignored, and that the way to breathe life into the culture was by re-establishing relations with this forgotten, ‘Gothic’ past.

Many of the crucial texts which made this point were written in the 1760s; perhaps the most important of all was Bishop Hurd’s Letters on Chivalry and Romance (1762). Hurd was a littérateur and no historical scholar, but he summarised a very widespread flow of thought in his enquiry into the nature and value of the Gothic:

The greatest geniuses of our own and foreign countries, such as Ariosto and Tasso in Italy, and Spenser and Milton in England, were seduced by these barbarities of their forefathers; were even charmed by the Gothic Romances. Was this caprice and absurdity in them? Or, may there not be something in the Gothic Romance peculiarly suited to the views of a genius, and to the ends of poetry?³

The arts of our ancient forefathers and the folk traditions on which they drew, Hurd is saying, may have been rude and may indeed not have conformed to rules which we have since come to regard as constitutive of aesthetic success and propriety; but may not this very rudeness and wildness be itself a source of power – a power which Spenser and Milton saw and which we may not be able to reclaim by any other means?

It is not simple to pin down precisely who the ‘forefathers’ were to whom Hurd refers, but one can point to four principal areas of past literature which were brought back into cultural prominence under the aegis of the ‘revival of the Gothic’. First, there was the truly ancient British heritage, insofar as any of it was available in the eighteenth century. The poet Thomas Gray regarded himself as well read in old Welsh poetry; James Macpherson, the celebrated forger, was referring back to an ancient British ‘tradition’ in his ‘translations’ of the imaginary Gaelic poet ‘Ossian’; Thomas Percy’s translation in 1770 of P. H. Mallet’s Northern Antiquities was designed to reacquaint its readers with the ancient history of northern Europe. Second, there were the ballads. Percy’s crucial collection, Reliques of Ancient English Poetry, was published in 1765, and it was the re-establishment of the credentials of this form of ‘folk-poetry’ which led on, through poems like Blake’s ‘Gwin, King of Norway’, written in the 1770s, to Coleridge’s ‘Ancient Mariner’ (1797–8) and then to Keats’s ‘La Belle Dame sans Merci’ and Shelley’s Mask of Anarchy, both written in 1819.

Third, Gothic was taken to include English medieval poetry, preeminently the works of Chaucer, which were given a scholarly edition by Thomas Tyrwhitt in 1775–8. And fourthly, it included, at least for some critics and writers, the major work of Spenser and of the Elizabethans which, it now came to be thought, had been buried under the reputation of the achievements of the mid-seventeenth century. This shift of value was probably complete by the 1780s: not, that is, in that Gothic ever became a universal standard of taste, but in that by that time the arguments which supported it had received their fullest articulation and the stage was set for Gothic to flow into romantic poetry which, apart from the fiction itself, was to prove its major cultural influence.

As we have said, however, t...