Chapter II. The Scope and Concept of the Gothic.

Transcription

1 11 Chapter II The Scope and Concept of the Gothic. A study of the Gothic demands a proper analysis of the scope and concept of the word 'Gothic'. When the Germanic tribes---goths, Visigoths and Ostrogoths plundered Europe in the third century they were inadvertently contributing a lot to a genre that would terrorize the people in later centuries. The word 'Goth' or 'Gothic' originates from the tribes. In the earliest usage of the word, it refers to the language and customs of these barbaric tribes who in the third, fourth and fifth centuries AD attacked the Roman Empire, and sacking Rome in 410AD. As the existing Greek and Roman hegemony was considered culturally superior, the attacking tribes were labeled 'barbaric' by many scholars. That was how the words 'Goth' and 'Gothic' later become associated with barbarism. But David Punter and Glennis Byron in their work, The Gothic say that "when the Italian art historians of the early Renaissance first used the term 'Gothic' in an aesthetic sense, they erroneously attributed a style of architecture to those Germanic tribes that sacked Rome, and identified this style as barbaric, disordered and irrational in opposition to the classical style"(3-4). But a majority of historians still attribute the new style to the Germanic tribes who attacked the continent in the third and fourth century. The new 'barbarians' soon shed their violent nature, settled in different parts of the continent, accepting Christianity as their religion. The Goths brought about an architectural and artistic sensibility to Europe redefining the aesthetics of the artists. So in the twelfth century, in France, Gothic art and craft forms began to merge with the existing

2 12 architecture. The designs of the Romanesque abbeys were eventually replaced or updated with the new style. So what was the new style like? The gothic style was distinctive in the sense that it brought about a vast change in the subtle and controlled style of Greco-Roman architecture. The new method was extreme in its appeal, seemingly uncontrolled, larger than life, demanding strong emotional response from the viewers. It evokes awe, pity, compassion and also an eeriness that verged on horror. Some scholars considered the new style crude and caricature-like, grotesque and exaggerated, far off from the naturalistic and idealistic world of the Greco-Roman period. Features like pointed arches, flying buttresses, narrow spires, stained glass windows, intricate traceries and vaults began to lend an eerie charm to the new buildings in Europe. The characteristic theme was the stranglehold of the past upon the present with all its majestic and intricate features adding to the drama. This theme is stressed by including enclosed and haunted settings like, crypts, under passages, gloomy mansions, castles convents etc. The element of decay and ruin against which these gothic features are placed allude to a dark age of oppression in the past. The pointed arches and the spirals were meant to suggest heavenward aspiration. The Gothic art and architecture were meant to make a magical effect upon the viewer evoking strong senses of fear and terror. The majestic Gothic building, which tower over the viewers giving them a sense of puniness before the menacing structure, was later found to be the perfect setting to play out the story intended to terrify the readers. The characters they empathize with in the stories, are at the mercy of the mysterious buildings they inhabit. In later Gothic, as wj can see in the case of the great cathedrals of northern France and England, the style was

3 13 characterized by its qualities of lightness, verticality, and, especially, increasing intricacy. It is believed to have made its first appearance at the abbey church of St Denis, just to the north of Paris, in the 1140s. With the advent of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, the interest in the Gothic style waned and the style was considered barbaric. They considered the old method belonging to 'The Dark ages' when the barbarians wiped off the rich Roman culture. For the Renaissance, therefore, Gothic and Classic were opposites: gothic barbarism, superstition and violence were the abhorred contraries to Classical civilization, reason and peace. Scholars of the period compared the gothic with the art of the Greeks and Romans, medieval art, architecture and society and considered the former to be barbaric. Thomas Addison illustrates this collocation of the gothic, the barbaric and \""-' I'- the medieval in The Spectator, No. 62 (May 11, 1711). Those writers, he opines, r L -._:,;. who lack the "strength of genius to give that majestic simplicity to nature, which we admire so much in the works of the ancients", are "Goths in poetry, who like those in architecture, not being able to come up to the beautiful simplicity of the old Greeks and Romans(6)". They despised the characteristic Gothic theme for functioning as the throttlehold of past upon the present, the encroachment of the unenlightened dark ages of oppression upon the modem sensibility which had to be stiffly opposed. These writers preferred the simple purity of form, proportion and symmetry of classical Greek and Roman architectural style which they believed had a profound influence upon the culture of the age. So many buildings were revived in the classical style in the Elizabethan age across Europe, from France to England. Except

4 14 in few places like the Oxford and Cambridge, architecture on the classical style came back with a vengeance giving a severe blow to the Gothic spirit. But in many places, the ideals of classical architecture merged with the existing gothic style _, F S 6 creating innovative features like gargoyles etc. A very famous example is (i ---i _ r:.., \.. Canterbury in England, reconstructed after the great fire, retaining several of major gothic elements. Even in its heyday, the neo-classical style of architecture could hardly contain the gothic theme in many buildings. In many places of Europe like Spain, France and Germany, we can see elements of gothic style retained as they built and rebuilt churches in the classical style. Thu[. w;e. ve the gothic vaults in the Basilica of San Petronio in Bologna, built in 1636 by the Baroque architect Carlo Rainaldi. The contemporary Baroque style had little to add in the churches in Oxford and Cambridge when additions and repairs were added to gothic buildings. In the late eighteenth century there happened to be a complete reversal of the approach towards the gothic architectural style among the scholars and architects of Europe. They suddenly developed a widespread archeological interest and sentimental curiosity about the crumbling gothic ruins of the medieval ages. Many architects led by Augustus Welby Northmore Pugin, began to create new structures completely based on the old gothic style. Pugin's greatest contribution to the English Gothic revival was the gilded interiors which stuck to the common gothic play on contrasts. The neo-gothic architects did extensive research on medieval architecture in order to revive the medieval forms which were quite distinct from the existing classical style in many buildings of Europe. It i _ s a curious fact to learn that more

5 15 gothic architecture was built in the nineteenth century than was originally built in the so-called gothic ages. In the nineteenth century revival of the gothic, many new features and methods were added to the medieval gothic, for instance, the gargoyles or the monsters guarding the churches of Europe were a new element. The work by Thomas Rickman, Attempt to Discriminate the Styles of English Architecture(l 819) provided the students of architecture a textbook which explained the origins and principles that govern the gothic style. But it should not be forgotten that the new style emerged as a reaction to the classical architecture that was a hallmark of the Age of Reason. The clarity and rationalism insisted by the neoclassical age was rejected for the sole reason of the appeal of the medieval gothic on the extreme emotions. The thrill of fearfulness and awe the gothic style inspired in the viewers was the perfect escapade that the people look forward as they reeled under the age of reason. The fake ruins that represent the gothic style began to rear their heads in many parts of the continent evoking strong emotional response. Many nations at this period found pride in declaring that the old style originated in their lands. Writers like Victor Hugo exhorted to nation to love the national architecture, subtly adding fat to the French claim to the gothic. The English on the other hand boldly termed, 'Early English' for gothic bolstering their cause. Germany replied by constructing the tallest Gothic building of the time, the Cathedral at Cologne in 1880s. An exemplary work of the revival gothic was the Strawberry Hill of Horace Walpole, who also wrote the first English gothic novel. Walpole drew ideas extensively from architects like William Kent who worked magic redesigning the English garden in the seventeenth century. So by the end of the century even neo-

6 16 classical architects like Robert Adam and James Wyatt began to provide gothic details while designing interiors. Very soon writers of the eighteenth century began to look out for the possibility of the closed and haunted settings of the gothic landscape to function as a background for their stories. The magical and eerie effect that these majestic buildings and the fake ruins offered had to be exploited for evoking a sense of awe and wonder in the reader who would be helplessly caught in the claustrophobic gothic castle. The backdrop of forests and strange landscapes also added to the high drama. The writers saw to it that the readers in such an atmosphere would be far away from their sunlit, familiar comfort zone ready to respond heavily emotional to the slightest verbal provocation. The age of romanticism with its appeal for the supernatural also contributed to the genesis of a new genre in literature---the gothic. It is out of this climate that the Gothic novel grew: a new and fearful genre for a new and fearful time. Even in its genesis it began to narrate supernatural stories with dark themes against the buildings that suited the tale---like castles, abbeys, mansions and monasteries which psychologically reduce the characters and the readers into puny little beings at the mercy of their surroundings. Many gothic novelists of the time looked for inspiration from related fields like art, poetry, landscape gardening etc. Many romantic writers of the period instilled power to their work by providing a gothic twist to the story. Even before the publication of the first gothic novel in English, the mood was already set by many writers in earlier years. Coleridge worked supernatural themes into many of his poetic works of which 'Ancient Mariner' is a classical example. The frenzied visions of William Blake, the witch dances in Bums' 'Tom

7 17 O' Shanter, the ghostly charm of James Hoggs' 'Kilmeny' and the restrained cosmic horror ofeat's ppems like 'Lamia' are precursors of the new spirit that was about.,,/ /' to haunt the European literature. The European writers also contributed a lot to the new genre. Bruger's 'Wild Huntsman' is a representative poem of the eerie wealth which the Germans contributed to the Gothic. Goethe's masterpiece poem 'Faust' plumbed new depths in exploring the sinister in man. It is very interesting to study the effect of the political and social incidents in the genesis of the genre. For example, the political and social situation in England also contributed to the introduction of the Gothic in the Island. The social revolution in the last decades of the eighteenth century made the people rethink about the effectiveness of the ideas of philosophers like Adam Smith and David Hume in new circumstances. The old schools of thoughts had to be replaced with new ones. Coupled with that, the revolution and its fallout which occurred in France during the period made the gothic function as a metaphor through which the readers got in touch with the gruesome incidents that were happening across the channel. The English writers, inspired by the revolutionary spirit of French nationals gave immense support through their works at the beginning of the political upheaval. But what happened after the success of the revolution forced them to rethink their attitude. The events along with the reign of terror ( ) forced the English writers to portray the horrors they witnessed in the works they conceived. Marquis de Sade had rightly said that the gothic of the times was a necessary result of the revolutionary tremors felt by the whole of Europe. He found that in order to depict the horrors they witnessed during the period, the writers had to call upon hell for aid and to find chimeras in the landscape.

8 18 Many scholars believe that just before the happenings in France, literature was threatened with a stagnation of fancy. French revolution gave them fresh impetus in a hitherto unworked ground inspired by the gruesome visuals which poured in from France under the terrorizing rule of Maximilian Robespierre. English novelists began to mirror the cruelties they saw in France, and in a way they began to repeat the French revolution in words. Thus can see the earlier gothic writers. t,. like Anne Radcliffe and Mathew Lewis genuinely moved by the happenings across the channel. In Europe the fad predates the French Revolution in a tradition of sentimental adventure stories, which provided the readers with the macabre frisson even as early as the 1730s. The French Roman J!QiJ:_hecame roman frenetique after <- the restoration of the French monarchy incorporating the grotesque images and incidents people witnessed during the revolution. In Germany also the readers were enthralled by reading stories about robbers and ghosts. In England the first major Gothic work was \,The Castle of Otranto t by Horace Walpole written in 1764, a counterfeit medieval tale which openly advocated a blend of two kinds of romance, with the former ruled by imagination and improbability and the latter governed by the rules of probability rooted in common I,... life. Considered to be a mediocre work, The Castle of Otranto \was destined to work as a precursor to the literature of the weird. Influenced by the Italian translations of the mythical work, 'Onuphrio Muralt' Walpole laced the story with supernatural elements he might have read in Macbeth and Hamlet, and also added comical elements for contrast. Walpole profoundly influenced by the eeriness of the gothic castle he built, added its magic

9 19 into the novel also. Apart from the gothic castle, mysterious deaths, supernatural happenings, a Byronic villain and a damsel in distress were also added to intensify the mystery of the story. Even though the story was considered to be mediocre and tedious with its impaired style as it failed to evoke a weird atmosphere, it defined the gothic genre as it came out. The novel tells us the story of a cruel and usurping prince Manfred who is bent upon doing mischief just to maintain his power. The tale begins with a gruesome spectacle as a giant helmet falls upon the head of the son of the prince, instantly killing him. Isabella the bride of Manfred's dead son now faces another threat in the form of the Manfred who wants to continue his line through her. She flees horrified, through the subterranean crypts beneath the castle only to be saved 1 1,,F" by Theodore who seems to be a peasant. The confrontation begins, and SOr-- the presence of the supernatural attacking the castle in many ways. Thunderclaps, strange apparitions, giant armour all accentuate the drama until they reach their climax with the armed specter of the late king Alphonso, who was usurped by Manfred rising out of the ruins ascending through the parting clouds revealing that Theodore is the son of Alphonso. Theodore marries Isabella at the end and Manfred realizing his mistakes, retires into a monastery for penitence. Even though the tale seems too ineffective to produce any kind of horror true to the spirit of the gothic, the thirst of the readers for something new was immense and the story was accepted by the reading public. Such stories were true metaphors of the horrors of the period. The gothic elements like the castle and other architectural tropes had big role to the story. In fact at a point we would suspect that the actual villain is the castle itself. Manfred with his weaknesses fails to provoke

10 20 any horror in the mind of the reader. But the castle with its ruins, corridors and hidden catacombs was villainous enough to evoke fear. Walpole displaced the readers by giving all the characters Italian names and 'Otranto' itself is an exotic name quite foreign to the English reader. All this paraphernalia and the techniques that Walpole weaved into his gothic texture were successful enough to make up for the lack of a convincing terror story. English writing gradually warmed up to the immense possibilities that the new genre offered. Walpole used the term "A Gothic Story", to mean 'medieval' as a subtitle in the second edition of The Castle of Otranto; his attempt to evoke the manners of ancient days, of the medieval world. He found inspiration in a society that was plagued by supernatural events and violent passions. He pitched the medieval world. against the decadent modern world as a reaction against reason and logic. In order to wed the ancient world of improbabilities to the modern romance of probability he depended upon the power of the psyche. The story also harped on many themes which become the staple diet of the gothic in later years, like incest and forbidden passion; the rivalry between father and son; the pursuit of the damsel and also the mysterious revisit of the past upon the present. The element of past revisiting the present became in later course the basic trope of gothic in film and literature. The gory violence as we begin to witness even in the first scene as the giant helmet falls on the head of Manfred's son, crushing him to death is a recurrent spectacle in many gothic novels. The way nature and inanimate objects suddenly assume life in the story influenced later writers about infusing terror in the minds of readers using innovative ways.

11 21 A study into gothic demands a detailed analysis of the writers who were involved into gothic style of writing. The seeds of the Gothic theme can be traced into old times when man derived pleasure in instigating terror upon his fellow beings. Many artists of the past found the use of inducing pain and horror upon the viewers using many ingenious artistic methods. They unsettled the viewers by presenting grotesque images driving home the truth about the inevitability of death and human misery. The middle age concept of memento morris in which the theme of death is deviously portrayed had a noble purpose as it functioned as an antidote to sin. Perhaps the most telling examples of art of this regard are the little ivory statuettes of the sixteenth century that show, on one side, a beautiful woman or a pair of lovers embracing, and on the other the gruesome image of a rotting corpse. In Divine rr:1 Jl J... t};,, iromedy, the great Italian poet Dante portrayed the spectacle of hell with the same I purpose of reminding the human beings about the consequences of their acts. ', Ii-::... Inspired by such works and the new architectural style in England, Horace Walpole wrote the first Gothic story, The Castle of Otranto. Even though, Walpole's novel originated out of his obsession with the medieval, it had a darker purpose of reminding the readers of the other side oflife. He originally claimed that the book was a real medieval romance he had discovered and republished. And he deliberately revived some of the elements of the medieval romance in the new form. The basic plot created many other gothic tropes, including supernatural incidents, a damsel in distress and an ancestral curse, all rooted in a sinister castle with countless trappings such as hidden passages and murky vaults.

12 22 By making the supernatural beings from the past revisit the present time where characters who were contemporary in thought and action well, he made the horror too close to the reader. The Gothic castle with its trappings, like vaults, trap doors, dungeons, rattling chains, etc. was a new inclusion in an English tale. So we see, giant helmets with plumes fall crushing men to death, statues bleed, apparitions come through the clouds, and ancestral portraits sigh, but they are all portrayed in an off hand manner as if they are routine, accepted as natural occurrences by the characters of the novel. Even the violent nature which empathizes and reacts with fu ry to the incidents in the sto ry are part of the world where the characters dwell. Many writers who came later admitted that they were inspired by the work of Horace Walpole. Clara Reeve, Ann Radcliffe and Sir Walter Scott, acknowledged their indebtedness to The Castle of Otranto, with Reeve calling her acclaimed novel The Old English Baron,. the literary offspring of Walpole's novel. Many writers who came later have surpassed Walpole by their litera ry merit and also their contribution to the genre though the credit for writing the first novel in Gothic tradition rests with Walpole. Anne Radcliffe is the most prominent among the gothic writers who gave a definite shape to the genre by her works. She understood the importance of exploring the psychology of fear and suspense thereby reforming the gothic canon from a degradable state. She transformed the Gothic novel from a mere vehicle for the depiction of terror into an instrument for exploring the psychology of fear and suspense. Her novel, T'f"_Mysteries of Udolpho(l 794f)js one of the most important \_ gothic works in English. She had already established\her name in the gothic genre with her novel, A Sicilian Romance (1790). But it was Radcliffe's The Mysteries of Udolpho, which established her reputation as the preeminent Gothic novelist. l,

13 23 She used all the gothic tropes, the ones provide by gothic castle, the landscapes and also the supernatural presence to create suspense in her work. The lyrical style and the focus on the psychological delineation of her characters were new elements in the new genre. The most important theme of the story was the victory o(,., virtue over villainy: a feature of almost all the novels of Radcliffe. She became the best-selling author in England, United States and Europe very soon. For many centuries critics have pondered over the influence of Radcliffe's style on the genre. She was very particular in making her good characters triumph at the end. Reading her novels, one would never fail to notice the Salvatorian landscapes against which the characters are pitted. Her linking of terror and beauty can be related to Burke's idea of sublime beauty. She would never like her readers to leave her book in a dark unsatisfied mood. The explanation at the end to all the mysteries that happened in the story would have spoiled the fun for many readers. Radcliffe resolves her plots in a rational and orderly way, providing logical explanations for seemingly supernatural events. This was perhaps the most important contribution to the gothic genre. The writers who came later sometimes reject or accept this method, but it was a definite problem, gothic writers later had to face. Many writings which came soon like The Castle of Wolfenbach, Clermont, Mysterious Warnings, Necromancer of the Black Forest, Midnight Bell, Orphan of the Rhine, and Horrid Mysteries written by inferior writers tried to be horrific, but failed to catch reader interest. At about the same time with the genesis of the English Gothic, parallel Romantic literary movements developed in continental Europe: the roman noir ("black novel") in France (including such writers as Guillaume Ducray- Duminil, Baculard d'arnaud, and Madame de Genlis) and the Schauerroman

14 24 ("shudder novel") - which were often more horrific and violent than the English gothic novel. The Monk (1796), written by Martin Gregory Lewis was the next classic of the genre, and it in tum inspired even Radcliffe, albeit to 'correct' it in The Italian. The Monk is a notorious eighteenth-century novel of horror that is considered one of the greatest examples of English Gothic fiction. Unlike his predecessors in the Gothic (/ \ schoot Martin Lewis emphasized the graphic and the sensational. The blend of unconcealed sexuality and horror made a scandal in England, and its author, soon came to be known as "Monk" Lewis. Inspired by the grotesque visuals of the time Lewis's novel presents a critique of human vice and explores the conflict between religion and human sexuality. Even though the novel was a direct attack on the Catholic church, its depraved monks, sadistic inquisitors and spectral nuns, his views about the religion profoundly influenced the genre. Anne Radcliffe wrote her last novel The Italian ( 1797) responding to it. Radcliffe delineated terror and horror in a dialogue, unfinished at her death in, On the Supernatural in Poetry. She says that: Terror and horror are so far opposite, that the first expands the soul, and awakens the faculties to a high degree of life; the other contracts, freezes, and nearly annihilates them. I apprehend, that neither Shakespeare nor Milton by their fictions, nor Mr. Burke by his reasoning, anywhere looked to positive horror as a source of the sublime, though they all agree that terror is a very high one; and where lies the great difference between horror and terror, but in

15 25 the uncertainty and obscurity, that accomp the an., respecting the dreaded evil?"(as qtd in Gothic Bodies, p 37) t She distinguished her style as invoking terror, far away from the horror gothic "" represented by Lewis. C"'" The excesses and frequent absurdities of the traditional Gothic sometimes became the butt of ridicule in England in the nineteenth century. The most famous parody of the Gothic is Jane Austen's novel Northanger Abbey (1818) in which the naive protagonist, after reading too much Gothic fiction, conceives herself a heroine of a Radcliffian romance and imagines murder and villainy on every side, though the trnth turns out to be somewhat more prosaic. Romantic poets like Coleridge and Keats also contributed a lot to the genre. Coleridge's Christabel and Keats's La Belle Dame Sans Merci present lady vampires in exotic backgrounds. The poetry, romantic adventures and character of Lord Byron, characterized by his spumed lover Lady Caroline Lamb as 'mad, bad and dangerous to know' was another inspiration for the Gothic, providing the archetype of the Byronic /p hero. Byron features, under the codename of 'Lord Ruthven', in Lady Caroline's own.., Gothic novel: Glenarvon (1816). Byron also figures as the host of the celebrated ghost-story competition involving himself, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary Shelley and John William Polidori on the banks of Lake Geneva in the summer of 1816 when two of the most famous gothic stories were created--- Mary Shelley's Frankenstein: A Modern Prometheus (1818) and Polidori's The Vampyre (1819). Mary Shelley in her celebrated work, 'Frankenstein: The Modern Prometheus, gave a defining impetus to the horror genre by contributing the 'mad scientist' element to the Gothic. Her monster later became a powerful metaphor for the modem

16 26 age and one of the most recognizable figures in cinema and literature. The philosophical and psychological resonance of the novel is still under study. Critics agree that with the depiction of a seemingly godless universe where science and technology have gone awry, Shelley created a powerful metaphor for the modem age. 'The Vampyre' written by John William Polidori is another influential work of fiction ever written and spawned a craze for Vampire fiction and theatre (and latterly film) which has not ceased to this day. Rather than use the crude, bestial vampire of folklore as a basis for his story, Polidori gave a twist by basing his character on Byron. The character "Lord Ruthven" was given as a thinly-disguised Byron fi gu re. Jan Potocki is another famous writer during the era, whose novel The Manuscript Found_in Saragossa, (written in French, original title: Manuscrit Trouve a Saragosse) was a frame tale that collects the intertwining stories of a cast of gypsies, thieves, cabbalists, and others that the Walloon Guard Alphonse van Worden meets in the Sierra Morena of 18th century Spain while en route to Madrid. The novel covers a wide variety of themes - from the gothic to the picaresque to the erotic to the moral. The novel was influenced by celebrated works like the Decameron and the Arabian Nights. Me/moth the Wanderer (1820) by Charles Robert Maturin combines themes of Anti-Catholicism with a Byronic hero. With its use of landscape to create an atmosphere of horror and suspense, and the presence of supernatural events, Me/moth the Wanderer is widely indebted to the Gothic novels of Ann Radcliffe and Matthew.,t / "') r. i -, /. f ci l ' Gregory Lewis. Critics often consider "Me moth the Wanderer in 1820 as the last o the Classic Gothic novel or the end of the true Gothic novel.

17 27 In the Victorian era Gothic novel declined into the cheap horror fiction of the J \4 '.;, ) "penny dreadful" type, exemplified by the serial novel Varney the Vampire. Penny.. ---, - k -- dreadful was the name given to a kind of cheaply produced book containing bloodthirsty narratives of crime, mostly mere reprints or plagiarisms from prominent,.- Gothic novefi The stories themselves were reprints or sometimes rewrites of Gothic thrillers such as The Monk or The Castle of Otranto, as well as new stories about famous criminals. Some of the most famous of these penny part stories were The String of Pearls: A Romance, The Mysteries of London (inspired by the French serial, The Mysteries of Paris) and Varney the Vampire. Black Bess or the Knight of the Road, outlining the largely imaginary exploits of real-life highwayman Dick Turpin, continued for 254 episodes. The Gothic had to wait until Edgar Allen who explores these 'terrors of the soul' for its next major period of growth. The legendary villainy of the Revolution and the Spanish Inquisition, previously explored by Gothic writers like Radcliffe, Lewis and Maturin, is revisited in Poe's work, The Pit and the Pendulum + (l842). Poe openly mentioned the name of Anne Radcliffe in the novel The Oval Portrait (1842), revealing the source of his inspiration. Poe's work brings a close connection between Gothic fiction and detective fiction, which grows out of the Gothic, and the continuing overlap between Gothic fiction and science fiction. Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights (184 7) further transports the Gothic to the forbidding Yorkshire Moors and features ghostly apparitions and a Byronic anti-hero (:' in the person of the demonic Heathcliff. The dark and foreboding environment described at the beginning of the novel foreshadows the gloomy atmosphere found in the remainder of the book. The harsh, gloomy characteristics of the land are reflected

18 28 in the human characters. Many commentators observe that Emile Bronte with her fierce animal imagery, dream motifs and scenes of raw violence incorporated in her works had influenced the gothic genre in later years. Bronte, even though had made use of the gothic she also deviated from that tradition in significant ways. Wuthering Heights continuds to defy categorization and endures as a literary classic. Charlotte Bronte's highly acclaimed novel Jane Eyre and Villette (1853), have been discussed as part of the Gothic literary tradition, and contain the necessary elements of mystery, heightened passions, and the supernatural. Her Jane Eyre (1847) uses many motifs from Gothic fiction, such as the Gothic manor (Thornfield), the Byronic hero (Rochester and Jane herself) and also the madwoman in the attic. The Bronte sisters even though they did not adhere closely to the genre, borrowed liberally from the Gothic. Through their uncharacteristic female characters, they reinterpreted and expanded the genre. Another prominent writer of gothic and supernatural fiction of the Victorian era was Sheridan Le Fanu. His Uncle Silas (1864) had the gloomy villain, the menacing mansion and weak damsel show the direct lineage of both Walpole's Otranto and Radcliffe's Udolpho. His short story collection 'In a Glass Darkly' (1872) includes the matchless vampire tale Carmilla, which influenced Bram Stoker's Dracula. Together with his predecessor Maturin and his successor Stoker, Le Fanu formed a sub-genre of Irish Gothic, whose stories, featuring castles set in a barren landscape, with a cast of remote aristocrats dominating an atavistic peasantry. Still Le Fanu rarely depended on the stock devices of Gothic literature-such as isolated castles, forlorn landscapes, and maniacal villains he opted for subtlety and mystery,

19 29 and routinely left unexplained incidents in his stories for the purpose of intensifying the drama. Right from his childhood, Charles Dickens was influenced by the Gothic stories. Even though he did not make any significant contribution to the genr an "' trace the influence of supernatural horror in many of his works. His most explicitly Gothic work is his last novel The Mystery of Edwin Drood (1870). Classic works in the 1880's include Robert Louis Stevenson's 0r Jekyll and Mr Hyde ' 1 (1886), Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), Henry James's The Turn of the Screw (1898) and the stories of Arthur Machen. Bram Stoker in 1897 created the supreme gothic villain of all times---count Dracula. By establishing Transylvania and Eastern Europe as the locus classicus of the Gothic, Bram Stoker distilled the essence of atmosphere building in his novel. Many critics have suggested that Stoker's novel both exaggerates and intensifies the English Gothic literary conventions laid down by Horace Wal pole in his supernatural romance, while some others dismiss it as a straightforward horror novel, which shocks and disgusts readers. But in the twentieth century scholars began to attend seriously to the gothic text exploring new meanings. The novel has never gone out of print since its first publication. Regarded as the best-known and most enduring Gothic vampire story ever published, Dracula became one of the most adapted stories on screen evoking a supreme universal fear. Stoker's remaining novels and works of short fiction are primarily characterized by their macabre nature and focus on such themes as death, male rivalry, ambivalence toward women, and the morality of good and evil. Among them, Dracula's Guest,

20 30 originally intended as a prefatory chapter to Dracula, is one of Stoker's best-known stories. Meanwhile in America by the end of the 19th century Ambrose Bierce and Robert W. Chambers two notable writers began to write stories in gothic fashion. While Bierce tried to terrify the readers in Poe's fashion, Chambers, indulged in the decadent style of Wilde and Machen. Southern Gothic, a subgenre of the Gothic writing style, unique to American literature thrived in the new land. It depended on supernatural, ironic, or unusual events to guide the plot. With its intention to explore social issues rather than indulge in cheap horror, the southern gothic brought the genre into new heights. The Southern Gothic author usually avoids perpetuating antebellum stereotypes like the contented slave, the demure Southern belle, the chivalrous gentleman, or the righteous Christian preacher. Instead, the writer takes classic Gothic archetypes, such as the damsel in distress or the heroic knight, and portrays them in a more modem and realistic manner - transforming them into, for example, a spiteful and reclusive spinster, or a white-suited, fan-brandishing lawyer with ulterior motives. While often disturbing, Southern Gothic authors commonly use deeply flawed, grotesque characters for greater narrative range and more opportunities and to highlight unpleasant aspects of Southern culture, without being too literal or appearing to be overly moralistic. This genre of writing is seen in the works of such famous Southern writers as William Faulkner, Flannery O'Connor, Harry Crews, Lee Smith, Lewis Nordan, Barry Hannah, Carson McCullers, Erskine Caldwell, Eudora Welty, Harper Lee, Truman Capote, Tennessee Williams, and Cormac McCarthy among others.

21 31 By the end of the nineteenth century gothic began to represent the contemporary horrors of the period. After a brief wane in interest, the horror tale experienced an upsurge in popularity at the beginning of the twentieth century. The major world wars and the death camps could have influenced the sudden spurt of the Gothic in popularity. Many new variants of Gothic fiction arose as a result. The Modem Gothic, a mass gothic novel popularized by writers like Victorian Holt and Phyllis A. Whitney had in their plots some set patterns. The book covers are typically stereotyped, with a young woman fleeing a mansion or castle in the background. Notable English twentieth century writers in the Gothic tradition include Algernon Blackwood, William Hope Hodgson, M. R. James, Hugh Walpole and Marjorie Bowen. In America pulp fiction magaz_i.p.es.such as Weird Tales reprinted classic Gothic horror tales from the previous century, by such authors as Poe, Arthur Conan- Doyle, Edward Bulwer-Lytton and printed new stories by modem authors featuring both traditional and new horrors. The most significant of these was H. P. Lovecraft who also wrote an excellent conspectus of the Gothic and supernatural horror tradition in his Supernatural Horror in Literature (1936). In 193 8, came the quintessential Modem Gothic thriller, Daphne Du Maurier's Rebecca, (1938) which later influenced the female gothics. Rebecca is the story of a woman who feels a sense of competition with her husband's first wife, who died under mysterious circumstances. An interesting psychological study of a young woman married to an older man, as well as a gripping Gothic novel that includes murder, violence, and a mysterious, haunted mansion--- Rebecca became a best-seller. The Romantic strand of Gothic was taken up in Rebecca which is in many ways a reworking of Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre. Her other works like, Jamaica Inn

22 32 (1936), also display Gothic tendencies. du Maurier wrote fantasies involving pirates, smuggling, and ladies in distress incorporating mystery and suspense.. In her short story The Birds (1959) du Maurier creates a nightmare world in which great flocks of birds inexplicably attack and kill humans. The work was made into a popular motion picture directed by Alfred Hitchcock. After the 1950s, Gothic became popular and prolific with authors such as Joan Aiken, Dorothy Eden, Dorothy Fletcher, Victoria Holt, Barbara Michaels, Clarissa Ross, Mary Stewart and Jill Tattersall enriching the field. Perhaps the most important gothic writers of the modem era are Stephen King and Anne Rice. With the publication of Interview With The Vampire in 1976, Anne Rice became the most important contributor to the gothic genre since Bram Stoker. With her painstaking attention to detail and ornate prose Rice blended new issues into the gothic texture. /;-\, ( For the first time, the gothic villain is allowed to tell his story in a melodramatic tone. For the first time, evil was treated with sympathy: vampires are philosophizing victims who must spend eternity debating good and evil. Her explorations of the darker side of society, psychology, and culture lend anew charm to the genre. In the same period, Stephen King, a prolific and immensely popular author of horror fiction blends elements of the traditional Gothic tale with those of the modem psychological thriller, detective, and science fiction genres. The deep exploration into issues like marital infidelity lends credibility to the supernatural elements in his.j/ /' fiction. Very soon he became an authority of the gothic writing in the modem century. With 'Salem's Lot (1975), The Shining (1977) and Pet Sematary (1983), he catered to the tastes of the readers who love mystery and suspense. Other King novels cited for containing elements of the Gothic include The Dead Zone (1979), Christine (1983),

23 33 Cycle of the Werewolf(1983), The Talisman (1984), Bag of Bones (1997), and Black House (2001). With the introduction of new media, the themes of the literary Gothic have begun to get translated into a variety of fields. The twentieth century gothic horror films such the classic Universal horror films of the 1930s, Hammer Horror and Roger Corman's Poe cycle cashes in on the popularity of the horror tale. Twentieth century popular music also drew on Gothic themes, eventually resulting in gothic rock and the goth subculture surrounding it. More recently, the gothic tradition has been expanded to new media forms on the internet. As an example, with the rise of internet literature, G.E. Graven's: Grotesque, A Gothic Epic (Online Novel) is freely available as hypertext gothic fiction. A deep study into gothic demands an understanding of the recurring motifs and themes. The gothic genre since its inception has always drawn its inspiration from the real life incidents from the social and political life. The violent Nature in her cataclysmic moods has also caught the imagination of the gothic writer. Perhaps the eruption of Vesuvius is one of the best sources of horror for many centuries during which gothic was evolving. The Englishmen have already had some image of the horrible nature of Vesuvius when it erupted in The terrible violence of nature, the puniness of humanity in everything except in fears, the symbolism of storms and lightning---all attracted the English artists and writers. Naples and its surrounding vistas enriched the English visual imagination in the late seventeenth century and gave a new gothic aesthetic to the English speaking world. There were artists like Salvator Rosa who plunged into the potential beauty of the horror that was seething in the bowels of the

24 34 Vesuvius. He repudiated monkish submission by vanishing into "wild but splendid regions... which modem art had not yet violated"(96-97), to quote his biographer Lady Morgan in Rosa's supreme contribution to the gothic sensibility was in painting savage and desolate scenery. His Scene of fvitchcraft is the quintessential gothic image. The witches, old men, the half-dragged out skeleton all lend an eerie charm to the painting. This is Rosa's reminder of inwardness of people's fear and fantasies, and their potential for secret tawdriness. Rosa presents a total inversion of Christian values by portraying a withered tree-trunk with a grimacing corpse hanging from its bough alluding to the crucifixion of Christ. Rosa perhaps had burlesque intentions in c/, ' 'Scene of!iitchcraft ': the viciousness is so busy in this picture, and the old people and crones such potentially comical figures, with their grimacing faces reminiscent of the specialty of Neapolitan street theater. The same comical treatment of serious subject,..--.-/' can be seen in Rosa's witchcraft poem. La Strega, or The Witch, tells of Phyllis, who threatens to use infernal spells on the lover who has forsaken her. An analysis of Gothic also requires a proper study of the contradicting facets of the human mind which craves for violence and a thorough understanding about the history of man's dalliance with such horrors. Behavioral scientists are perplexed about the emergence of aggressive elements in an individual. In Europe the seventeenth and eighteenth century, witch-hunts became a regular happening in social life. Many of the erring women were brought to 'justice' and eventually bumed---on the charge that they colluded with the dark forces of nature against the society. There were trials even 1- in the l 5t and early 16th centuries, but then the witch scare went into decline, before becoming a big issue again and peaking in the 17th century, thus setting the stage

25 35 ready for the Gothic revival in literature. Over one hundred and fifty people were arrested and imprisoned in 1692 and 1693 when in Salem village in the US some girls began to have unusual 'fits'. Their doctor suggested one cause, Witchcraft. That diagnosis launched a Puritan inquisition that took 25 lives, filled prisons with innocent people, and frayed the soul of a Massachusetts community called Salem. Historian Richard Trask in an online interview given to National Geographic finds that in many cases even the accused believed in wild accusations: In the 17th century, witches were both male and female persons who had made a pact to serve the devil. In exchange, the devil passed along certain powers to the witches. According to confessed witch William Barker, the devil promised to pay all Barker's debts and that he would live comfortably. The devil also told him that he wanted to set up his own kingdom where there would be neither punishment nor shame for sin ("Salem"). Witchcraft with all its dark connotations and possibilities has also caught the imagination of the Gothic writers in later years. The witch is normally depicted as an elderly hag-like crone or as a beautiful, seductive woman (and she is frequently both). This depiction of witches as gypsies or women of loose virtues is quite common within Gothic Tales and has seemingly set the standard within the minds of the readers. In Hawthorne's short story Young Goodman Brown f e can see elements of witch trial which becomes more subtle in the work Scarlet/f;tter. Within The Scarlet Letter, heroine Hester Prynne is treated like a witch by her townspeople based on her adulterous nature and is persecuted accordingly. Richard Kopley finds in his work, The Threads of the Scarlet Letter "Hawthorne explicitly treated witchcraft

26 36 thereby including Mistress Bibbins an historical figure executed for witchcraft in 1656, and by liberally mentioning the Black Man and his dreaded book"(89). Perhaps it was the aftermaths of the French revolution which sets the ball rolling for the Gothic canon. At the initial stage of the revolution, the European and English intellectuals were singing eulogies for the ideals of the revolution. In denying the doctrines of original sin in his 'Discourse on the origins and Foundations of {equality amongst Men (1754) Rousseau also asserted the inherent goodness of! mankind at the beginning of the French revolution. He attributed the ills of society to private property and extolled the cultural lives of savages. But the French Revolution proved him grossly wrong. With the Reign of Terror, the guillotine soon became the symbol of a string of executions. The Revolutionary Tribunal condemned thousands of people to death by the new instrument, while mobs beat other victims to death. On Monday September, _ "I! IL..,_,). ' [ 10th 1792 The Times of London carried a story covering events in revolutionary, France: "The streets of Paris, strewed with the carcasses of the mangled victims, are become so familiar to the sight, that they are passed by and trod on without any particular notice. The mob thinks no more of killing a fellow-creature, who is not even an object of suspicion, than wanton boys would of killing a cat or a dog" (p,8). /-- Horace Walpole also believed that, Gothic is particularly suited to moments when human experience reaches the limits of intelligibility, and the French disorders after 1789 were just such an occasion. Marquis de Sade, was perhaps the first critic to identify the fictitious horrors of the Gothic novel with the all-too-real horrors of the 1790s. His despised his land--- that dirty morbid village called Versailles, where kings intended for adoration in their capital flee form the subjects who want them, where

27 37 ( ). ambition, avarice, revenge and pride daily unite a host of unfortunates flying on the wings of boredom to offer sacrifices to the idol of the day, where the highest French nobility, who could gibe them responsible leadership on their estates, submit to humiliation in antechambers. He said that the revolutionary age had numbed the senses of the general populace to such an extent that authors should invoke hell to find to find chimeras of landscape to reflect the horrors they witness during the period. For the people of Europe, gothic was the only genre which truly represented the horrors of the period. Suddenly gothic fiction seemed important. The most important works provoked by the revolution were Matthew Lewis The Monk and Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1818). Shelley was very subtle in portraying the horror of the period. With her scenes heavily symbolic, without sentimentality or cheap sensationalism. she changed the source of horror and mystery from supernatural t-powers into scientific power. Her book is a parable about the abuse of power and the revenge of the abused. Ambition is an evil in Shelley's book; as Walpole indicated in Otranto. The ugly monster which rears its head in the novel turning into rebellion against his maker is a metaphor for the public that had gone mad in France. It is a notso-veiled reference to the revolution, when the protagonist in the novel warns himself, "A race of devils would be propagated on the earth who might make the very existence of the species of man a condition precarious and full ofterror",(shelley 86),.-- if he repeats his mistake. While Walpole regarded the French revolutionaries as cannibals, Francisco Jose de Goya Lucientes and Sade represented the devilry of their

28 38 times by images of bodily mutilation, v{e see the monstrous neediness in the face of Goya's Saturn has its counterpart in the face of Shelley's monster. Goya transformed the spectacle of public executions and ritual humiliations of transgressors as well as the arcane investigations of the Inquisitors courageously into searing social satire and into images of universal horror. His drawings are often in obscure form because they express political or religious allusions which would have been dangerous to make explicit; his character, in any case, was drawn to nightmarish symbolism. This comfortless view of humanity reeling under supernatural events is represented in plate 6 of 'Los Caprichos' entitled Nobody knows Anybody', given the caption by Goya: "the word is a masquerade; face dress, voice, everything is feigned. Everybody wants to appear what he is not; everybody deceives, and nobody knows anybody." This evasiveness is central theme to the gothic imagination. Gothic fiction evolved in the century when Britain was striving to establish its own identity. Bereft of any revolutionary ideas like the ones which poured in from across the channel English people were trying to establish their identity in a new world when the reign of Terror came in France, which gave the English gothic writers enough material to mark their presence. The major defining feature of British national identity at the time was Protestantism; therefore, the gothic novel worked to present 'others' as untrustworthy foreigners, usually Catholic Europeans, particularly from France, Italy, and Spain. They found their identity by distancing themselves from the atholic Other, and the \ new genre helped them to establish and identity of their own. One example of this is Matthew Lewis's The Monk, published in This novel deems Catholics as involved in all kinds of vices like homoeroticism,