gothic literature definition essay

A Brief Introduction to Gothic Literature

Elements, Themes, and Examples from the Gothic Style

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Ph.D., English Language and Literature, Northern Illinois University
M.A., English, California State University–Long Beach
B.A., English, Northern Illinois University

The term Gothic originates with the architecture created by the Germanic Goth tribes that was later expanded to include most medieval architecture. Ornate, intricate, and heavy-handed, this style of architecture proved to be the ideal backdrop for both the physical and the psychological settings in a new literary genre, one that concerned itself with elaborate tales of mystery, suspense, and superstition. While there are several notable precursors, the height of the Gothic period, which was closely aligned with Romanticism , is usually considered to have been the years 1764 to about 1840, however, its influence extends to 20th-century authors such as V.C. Andrews, Iain Banks, and Anne Rice.

Plot and Examples

Gothic plotlines typically involve an unsuspecting person (or persons)—usually an innocent, naive, somewhat helpless heroine—who becomes embroiled in complex and oftentimes evil paranormal scheme. An example of this trope is young Emily St. Aubert in Anne Radcliffe’s classic Gothic 1794 novel, "The Mysteries of Udolpho," which would later inspire a parody in form of Jane Austen ’s 1817 "Northanger Abbey."

The benchmark for pure Gothic fiction is perhaps the first example of the genre, Horace Walpole’s "The Castle of Otranto" (1764). Although not a long tale in the telling, the dark, its oppressive setting combined with elements of terror and medievalism set the bar for an entirely new, thrilling form of literature.

Key Elements

Most Gothic literature contains certain key elements that include:

Atmosphere : The atmosphere in a Gothic novel is one characterized by mystery, suspense, and fear, which is usually heightened by elements of the unknown or unexplained.
Setting : The setting of a Gothic novel can often rightly be considered a character in its own right. As Gothic architecture plays an important role, many of the stories are set in a castle or large manor, which is typically abandoned or at least run-down, and far removed from civilization (so no one can hear you should you call for help). Other settings may include caves or wilderness locales, such as a moor or heath.
Clergy: Often, as in "The Monk" and "The Castle of Otranto," the clergy play important secondary roles in Gothic fare. These (mostly) men of the cloth are often portrayed as being weak and sometimes outrageously evil.
The paranormal : Gothic fiction almost always contains elements of the supernatural or paranormal, such as ghosts or vampires. In some works, these supernatural features are later explained in perfectly reasonable terms, however, in other instances, they remain completely beyond the realm of rational explanation.
Melodrama : Also called “high emotion,” melodrama is created through highly sentimental language and instances of overwrought emotion. The panic, terror, and other feelings characters experience is often expressed in a way that's overblown and exaggerated in order to make them seem out of control and at the mercy of the increasingly malevolent influences that surround them.
Omens : Typical of the genre, omens—or portents and visions—often foreshadow events to come. They can take many forms, such as dreams, spiritual visitations, or tarot card readings.
Virgin in distress : With the exception of a few novels, such as Sheridan Le Fanu’s "Carmilla" (1872), most Gothic villains are powerful males who prey on young, virginal women (think Dracula). This dynamic creates tension and appeals deeply to the reader's sense of pathos, particularly as these heroines typically tend to be orphaned, abandoned, or somehow severed from the world, without guardianship.

Modern Critiques

Modern readers and critics have begun to think of Gothic literature as referring to any story that uses an elaborate setting, combined with supernatural or super-evil forces against an innocent protagonist. The contemporary understanding is similar but has widened to include a variety of genres, such as paranormal and horror.

Selected Bibliography

In addition to "The Mysteries of Udolpho" and "The Castle of Otranto," there are a number of classic novels that those interested in Gothic literature will want to pick up. Here's a list of 10 titles that are not to be missed:

"The History of the Caliph Vathek" (1786) by William Thomas Beckford
"The Monk" (1796) by Mathew Lewis
"Frankenstein" (1818) by Mary Shelley
"Melmoth the Wanderer" (1820) by Charles Maturin
"Salathiel the Immortal" (1828) by George Croly
" The Hunchback of Notre-Dame " (1831) by Victor Hugo
"The Fall of the House of Usher" (1839) by Edgar Allan Poe
"Varney the Vampire; or, the Feast of Blood" (1847) by James Malcolm Rymer
"The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde" (1886) by Robert Louis Stevenson
" Dracula " (1897) by Bram Stoker
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Gothic Literature — Definition, Elements, and Examples

What is Gothic literature?

Gothic literature focuses on the darker aspects of humanity paired with intense contrasting emotions such as pleasure and pain or love and death. A classic example of a Gothic novel is Frankenstein by Mary Shelley.

Gothic literature is often set around dilapidated castles, secluded estates, and unfamiliar environments.

Gothic works often includes characteristics like omens, the supernatural, and romance.

Gothic literature tends to incorporate revenge, family secrets, prophecies, psychological struggles, and "damsels in distress."

Gothic literature emerged in Europe during the 18th century and was inspired by Gothic architecture from the Middle Ages.

Like Romanticism, the Gothic style arose as a response to the Enlightenment. Gothic writers rebelled against the Enlightenment notion of understanding the world purely through logic. Romantics believed in individualism, idealism, and emotional passion, which they felt were positive ways to live.

Gothics agreed with the same ideas, yet they suggested the outcomes of following those ideas could have darker implications. As such, Gothic literature is often also identified as Dark Romanticism.

Gothic elements

Gothic literature in English typically contains characteristics like omens, the supernatural, romance, and anti-heroes.

The physical location of the setting within Gothic literature mimics or influences characters’ emotions. Since most Gothic stories are set in gloomy and foreboding places (old castles, cemeteries, dark forests, etc.) with ominous weather conditions (foggy, thunderstorms, etc.), the characters’ surroundings negatively impact them.

Writers often used omens to foreshadow future events that would disrupt the characters’ lives. These predictions came in the form of curses, nightmares, and/or visions and mostly forecast tragedy.

Plots often include supernatural elements like resurrection, spirits/ghosts, vampires, werewolves, etc. Some authors attempted to explain the existence of the supernatural, while others classified it as entirely paranormal. Regardless, the supernatural entities/events provide commentary on some aspect of the human condition.

Supernatural elements in Gothic literature

Many Gothic novels incorporate a romantic relationship between the protagonist and another character. However, these relationships are often destined for doom and tragedy, highlighting the negative implications of lost love.

Villains often take the form of male characters in some position of power. Authors may present these characters as sympathetic to hide their deceptive nature.

Through exaggerated and hyperbolic emotional expressions , authors present their characters in a state of intense fear, anxiety, stress, etc. The characters often experience great emotional distress, madness, or psychosis.

The protagonist is often developed as an anti-hero . These characters drive the plot, but they often lack conventional heroic qualities. These characters were often seen as much more realistic than the typical hero/heroine.

The anti-villain is the reverse of the anti-hero. While these characters are considered villains, they often blur the line between good and evil.

Gothic authors often use a hero-villain as the antagonist. These characters are so complex that it becomes difficult to determine whether they are good or bad.

Distressed female characters tend to be characterized as the victims; their suffering from being alone or abandoned often becomes the central focus of the plot. As such, female characters become controlled by male characters who have power due to their authority or social position.

Characters experience psychological struggles that can lead to hallucinations, anxiety, and/or psychosis.

Gothic literature examples

Some of the most notable writers who incorporated Gothic elements in their works include Mary Shelley, Edgar Allan Poe, and Bram Stoker:

Gothic Literature Essay

Gothic literature originated in the early nineteenth century. Writers of such works combined some elements of the medieval literature considered too fanciful and modern literature classified as too limited to realism. The settings reflected elements of horror and fear. They consisted of gloomy dungeons, underground passages, abundant usage of ghosts, and mysterious occurrences.

The relations reflected the extreme opposites such as life and death, dream and reality, right and wrong, and rationality and madness. The main aim of gothic literature was to evoke chilling terror by use of cruelty, mystery, and a combination of horror scenes. Gothic literature now includes works of fictions, which do not have medieval settings but create a worrisome atmosphere of terror in representing macabre or melodramatic violence.

Allan Edgar Poe short story, The Pit and the Pendulum, shows horrors associated with torture. Mental and physical torture are horrifying human experiences. The story also shows the cruelty and injustice people experience when they deviate from the established beliefs or when wrongly accused. The choice of settings as “THE PIT, typical of hell………. the Ultima Thule of all their punishments” (Poe 1989), shows the pervading elements of gothic literature.

Words, phrases, and imagery contribute to the effect of terror with morbidity and the expected horrifying death e.g. “Down — certainly, relentlessly down! It vibrated within three inches of my bosom! I struggled violently – furiously” and use of images like “Figures of fiends in aspects of menace, with skeleton forms, and other more really fearful images” (Poe 1989) create terrifying horror scenes.

Poe captures the use of explicit violence as a condemnation of the Inquisition. Poe shows confusion in the narrator’s mind as a “call to mind flatness and dampness; and then all is MADNESS — the madness of a memory which busies itself among forbidden things” (Poe 1989). Readers do not know whether the narrator is guilty or not. Poe leaves the moral judgment to his readers as he shows hope in rescue of the narrator.

The Cask of Amontillado by Poe shows terror as a means of punishing offenders. We do not see any evidence that Fortunato inflicted thousands of injuries and insults to Montresor. The short story demonstrates a human tendency in avenging wrong-doings. He foreshadows death in putting on a mask of black silk.

The concealed murder is a means to avoid the legal procedure for justice. Poe captures elements of death as follow “It was not the cry of a drunken man. There was then a long and obstinate silence. I laid the second tier, and the third, and the fourth; and then I heard the furious vibration of the chain” (Poe 1846).

The description of the setting alludes to scary and horrifying scenes such as “walls had been lined with human remains, piled to the vault overhead” and “I bowed him through several suites of rooms to the archway that led into the vaults. I passed down a long and winding staircase” (Poe 1846). The images of “A huge human foot d’or, in a field azure; the foot crushes a serpent rampant whose fangs are imbedded in the heel” present scary elements of gothic works (Poe 1846). Poe leaves the moral judgment about revenge to the readers.

Poe’s two short stories bear all the elements of horrifying and chilling gothic literature. The use of imagery and descriptions of the settings make the reader identify with the sufferings people go through in the name of seeking justice. In The Pit and the Pendulum, Poe does not prove the evidence of wrongdoings of the narrator.

Likewise, in The Cask of Amontillado , he fails to show us evidence that Fortunato inflicted injuries and insults to Montresor. Poe shows that all forms of retributions, either through a legal system or personal vendetta, are the worst form of horror people can experience. This is a case of blind justice and blind revenge.

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Bibliography

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Literary Theory and Criticism

Home › Literature › Gothic Novels and Novelists

Gothic Novels and Novelists

By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on March 11, 2019 • ( 6 )

The gothic novel is a living tradition, a form that enjoys great popular appeal while provoking harsh critical judgments. It began with Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1765), then traveled through Ann Radcliffe, Matthew Gregory Lewis, Charles Robert Maturin, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Edgar Allan Poe, Charlotte Brontë and Emily Brontë, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Charles Brockden Brown, Bram Stoker, Charles Dickens, Thomas Hardy, Henry James, and many others into the twentieth century, where it surfaced, much altered and yet spiritually continuous, in the work of writers such as William Faulkner, D. H. Lawrence, Iris Murdoch, John Gardner (1933-1982), Joyce Carol Oates, and Doris Lessing and in the popular genres of horror fiction and some women’s romances.

The externals of the gothic, especially early in its history, are characterized by sublime but terrifying mountain scenery; bandits and outlaws; ruined, ancient seats of power; morbid death imagery; and virgins and charismatic villains, as well as hyperbolic physical states of agitation and lurid images of physical degradation. Its spirit is characterized by a tone of high agitation and unresolved or almost-impossible-to-resolve anxiety, fear, unnatural elation, and desperation.

The first gothic novel is identifiable with a precision unusual in genre study. Walpole (1717-1797), the earl of Orford, began writing The Castle of Otranto in June, 1764,; he finished it in August and published it in an edition of five hundred copies in early 1765. Walpole was a historian and essayist whose vivid and massive personal correspondence remains essential reading for the eighteenth century background. Before writing The Castle of Otranto , his only connection with the gothic was his estate in Twickenham, which he called Strawberry Hill. It was built in the gothic style and set an architectural trend, as his novel would later set a literary trend.

Walpole did not dream of what he was about to initiate with The Castle of Otranto ; he published his first edition anonymously, revealing his identity, only after the novel’s great success, in his second edition of April, 1765. At that point, he no longer feared mockery of his tale of a statue with a bleeding nose and mammoth, peregrinating armor, and an ancient castle complete with ancient family curse. With his second edition, he was obliged to add a preface explaining why he had hidden behind the guise of a preface proclaiming the book to be a “found manuscript,” printed originally “in Naples in the black letter in 1529.” The reader of the first edition was told that The Castle of Otranto was the long-lost history of an ancient Catholic family in the north of England. The greater reading public loved it, and it was reprinted in many editions. By 1796, it had been translated into French and Spanish and had been repeatedly rendered into dramatic form. In 1848, the novel was still active as the basis for successful theatrical presentations, although the original gothic vogue had passed.

Close upon Walpole’s heels followed Radcliffe, Lewis, and Maturin. These three authors, of course, were not the only imitators ready to take advantage of the contemporary trend (there were literally hundreds of those), but they are among the few who are still read, for they made their own distinctive contributions to the genre’s evolution. Radcliffe (1764-1823) was born just as Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto was being published. She was reared in a middle-class milieu, acquainted with merchants and professionals; her husband was the editor of The English Chronicle and a fellow of the Society of Antiquaries. She lived a quiet life, was likely asthmatic, and seems to have stayed close to her hearth. Although she never became a habitué of literary circles and in her lifetime only published a handful of works, she is considered the grande dame of the gothic novelists and enjoyed a stunning commercial success in her day; she is the only female novelist of the period whose work is still read.

Radcliffe’s works include The Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne (1789), A Sicilian Romance (1790), The Romance of the Forest (1791), The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), The Italian: Or, The Confessional of the Black Penitents (1797), and Gaston de Blondeville (1826). She also wrote an account of a trip through parts of northern Europe, A Journey Made in the Summer of 1794 Through Holland and the Western Frontier of Germany (1795). Her remarkably sedate life contrasts strikingly with the melodramatic flamboyance of her works. Her experiences also fail to account for her dazzling, fictional accounts of the scenery of Southern Europe, which she had never seen.

Lewis, called Monk Lewis in honor of his major work, conformed in his life more closely to the stereotype of the gothic masters. Lewis (1775-1818) was a child of the upper classes, the spoiled son of a frivolous beauty, whom he adored. His parents’ unhappy marriage ended when he was at Westminster Preparatory School. There was a continual struggle between his parents to manage his life—his father stern and aloof, his mother extravagant and possessive.

Lewis spent his childhood treading the halls of large, old manses belonging both to family and to friends. He paced long, gloomy corridors—a staple of the gothic— and peered up at ancient portraits in dark galleries, another permanent fixture in gothic convention. Deeply involved with the literati of his day, Lewis (also homosexual) found an equivocal public reception, but his novel The Monk: A Romance (1796; also known as Ambrosio: Or, The Monk ), an international sensation, had an enormous effect on the gothic productions of his day. Lewis died on board ship, a casualty of a yellowfever epidemic, in the arms of his valet, Baptista, and was buried at sea.

Lewis’s bibliography is as frenetic as his biography. Although his only gothic novel is the infamous The Monk , he spent most of his career writing plays heavily influenced by gothic conventions; he also translated many gothic works into English and wrote scandalous poetry. Among his plays are Village Virtues (pb. 1796), The Castle Spectre (pr. 1797), The East Indian (pr. 1799), Adelmorn the Outlaw (pr., pb. 1801), and The Captive (pr. 1803). He translated Friedrich Schiller’s The Minister (1797) and August von Kotzebue’s Rolla: Or, The Peruvian Hero (1799). He became notorious for his poetic work The Love of Gain: A Poem Initiated from Juvenal (1799), an imitation of Juvenal’s thirteenth satire.

Maturin (1780-1824) is the final major gothic artist of the period. He was a Protestant clergyman from Dublin and a spiritual brother of the Marquis de Sade. He also was a protégé of Sir Walter Scott and an admirer of Lord Byron. His major gothic novel is Melmoth the Wanderer (1820), as shocking to its public as was Lewis’s The Monk . An earlier Maturin gothic was Fatal Revenge: Or, The Family of Montorio (1807). His other works include the novel The Milesian Chief (1812); a theological novel, Women: Or, Pour et Contre (1818); a tragedy, Bertram: Or, The Castle of St. Aldobrand (pr., pb. 1816), produced by Edmund Kean; and the novel The Albigenses (1824).

Among the legions of other gothic novelists, a few writers (especially the following women, who are no longer generally read) have made a place for themselves in literary history. These writers include Harriet Lee, known for The Canterbury Tales (1797-1805), written with her sister, Sophia Lee, author also of The Recess: Or, A Tale of Other Times (1783); Clara Reeve ( The Champion of Virtue: A Gothic Story , 1777; also known as The Old English Baron: A Gothic Story ); Regina Maria Roche ( The Children of the Abbey , 1796); Charlotte Smith ( Emmeline: Or, The Orphan of the Castle—A Novel , 1788); Charlotte Dacre ( Zofloya: Or, The Moor— A Romance of the Fifteenth Century , 1806); and Mary Anne Radcliffe ( Manfroné: Or, The One Handed Monk— A Romance , 1809).

Critics generally agree that the period gothics, while having much in common, divide into relatively clear subclassifications: the historical gothic, the school of terror, and the Schauer-Romantik school of horror. All gothics of the period return to the past, are flushed with suggestions of the supernatural, and tend to be set amid ruined architecture, particularly a great estate house gone to ruin or a decaying abbey. All make use of stock characters. These will generally include one or more young and innocent virgins of both sexes; monks and nuns, particularly of sinister aspect; and towering male and female characters of overpowering will whose charismatic egotism knows no bounds.

Frequently the novels are set in the rugged mountains of Italy and contain an evil Italian character. Tumultuous weather often accompanies tumultuous passions. The gothic genre specializes in making external conditions metaphors of human emotions, a convention thought to have been derived in part from the works of William Shakespeare. Brigands are frequently employed in the plot, and most gothics of the period employ morbid, lurid imagery, such as a body riddled with worms behind a moldy black veil.

The various subdivisions of the gothic may feature any or all of these conventions, being distinguished by relative emphasis. The historical gothic, for example, reveals the supernatural against a genuinely historical background, best exemplified by the works of the Lee sisters, who, although their own novels are infrequently read today, played a part in the evolution of the historical novel through their influence on Sir Walter Scott. The school of terror provided safe emotional titillation— safe, because the morbidity such novels portray takes place not in a genuine, historical setting, but in some fantasy of the past, and because the fearful effects tend to be explained away rationally at the end of the respective work. Radcliffe is the major paradigm of this subgroup. The Schauer-Romantik school of horror, best represented by Lewis and Maturin, did not offer the reassurance of a moral, rational order. These works tend to evoke history but stir anxiety without resolving or relieving it. They are perverse and sadistic, marked by the amoral use of thrill.

There are very few traditional gothic plots and conventions; a discrete set of such paradigms was recycled and refurbished many times. Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto, Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho, Lewis’s The Monk, and Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer represent the basic models of the genre.

Castle of Otranto

The Castle of Otranto , emphatically not historical gothic, takes place in a fantasy past. It is not of the school of terror either; although it resolves its dilemmas in a human fashion, it does not rationally explain the supernatural events it recounts. This earliest of the gothics trembles between horror and terror.

The story opens with Manfred, Prince of Otranto, ready to marry his sickly son, Conrad, to the beautiful Isabella. Manfred, the pattern for future gothic villains of towering egotism and pride, is startled when his son is killed in a bizarre fashion. The gigantic statuary helmet of a marble figure of Alphonse the Good has been mysteriously transported to Manfred’s castle, where it has fallen on and crushed Conrad.

Manfred precipitously reveals that he is tired of his virtuous wife, Hippolita, and, disdaining both her and their virtuous daughter, Mathilda, attempts to force himself on the exquisite, virginal Isabella, his erstwhile daughter-in-law elect. At the same time, he attempts to blame his son’s death on an individual named Theodore, who appears to be a virtuous peasant lad and bears an uncanny resemblance to the now helmetless statue of Alfonso the Good. Theodore is incarcerated in the palace but manages to escape. Theodore and Isabella, both traversing the mazelike halls of Otranto to escape Manfred, find each other, and Theodore manages to set Isabella free. She finds asylum in the Church of St. Nicholas, site of the statue of Alfonso the Good, under the protection of Father Jerome, a virtuous friar. In the process of persuading Jerome to bring Isabella to him, Manfred discovers that Theodore is actually Jerome’s long-lost son. Manfred threatens Theodore in order to maneuver Jerome into delivering Isabella. The long-lost relative later became a popular feature of the gothic.

Both Isabella and Theodore are temporarily saved by the appearance of a mysterious Black Knight, who turns out to be Isabella’s father and joins the forces against Manfred. A round of comings and goings through tunnels, hallways, and churches ensues. This flight through dark corridors also became almost mandatory in gothic fiction. In the course of his flight, Theodore falls in love with Mathilda. As the two lovers meet in a church, Manfred, “flushed with love and wine,” mistakes Mathilda for Isabella. Wishing to prevent Theodore from possessing the woman he thinks is his own beloved, Manfred mistakenly stabs his daughter. Her dying words prevent Theodore from revenging her: “Stop thy impious hand . . . it is my father!”

Manfred must now forfeit his kingdom for his bloody deed. The final revelation is that Theodore is actually the true Prince of Otranto, the direct descendant of Alfonso the Good. The statuary helmet flies back to the statue; Isabella is given to Theodore in marriage, but only after he completes a period of mourning for Mathilda; and order is restored. The flight of the helmet remains beyond the pale of reason, as does the extraordinary, rigid virtue of the sympathetic characters, but Manfred’s threat to the kingdom is ended. Here is the master plot for the gothic of the Kingdom

The Mysteries of Udolpho

Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho presents apparently unnatural behavior and events but ultimately explains them all. Not only will the sins of the past be nullified, but also human understanding will penetrate all the mysteries. In The Mysteries of Udolpho , the obligatory gothic virgin is Emily St. Aubert; she is complemented by a virginal male named Valancourt, whom Emily meets while still in the bosom of her family. When her parents die, she is left at the mercy of her uncle, the villainous Montoni, dark, compelling, and savage in pursuit of his own interests. Montoni whisks Emily away to Udolpho, his great house in the Apennines, where, desperate for money, he exerts himself on Emily in hopes of taking her patrimony while his more lustful, equally brutal friends scheme against her virtue. Emily resists, fainting and palpitating frequently. Emily’s propensity to swoon is very much entrenched in the character of the gothic heroine.

Emily soon escapes and, sequestered in a convent, makes the acquaintance of a dying nun, whose past is revealed to contain a murder inspired by lust and greed. Her past also contains Montoni, who acquired Udolpho through her evil deeds. Now repenting, the nun (née Laurentini de Udolpho) reveals all. The innocent victim of Laurentini’s stratagems was Emily’s long-lost, virtuous aunt, and Udolpho should have been hers. Ultimately, it will belong to Emily and Valancourt.

Radcliffe was known to distinguish between horror and terror and would have none of the former. Terror was a blood-tingling experience of which she approved because it would ultimately yield to better things. Horror she identified with decadence, a distemper in the blood that could not be discharged but rendered men and women inactive with fright. Lewis’s The Monk demonstrates Radcliffe’s distinction.

Lewis’s The Monk concerns a Capuchin friar named Ambrosio, famed throughout Madrid for his beauty and virtue. He is fervent in his devotion to his calling and is wholly enchanted by a picture of the Virgin, to which he prays. A young novice of the order named Rosario becomes Ambrosio’s favorite. Rosario is a beautiful, virtuous youth, as Ambrosio thinks, but one night Ambrosio perceives that Rosario has a female breast, and that “he” is in fact “she”: Mathilda, a daughter of a noble house, so enthralled by Ambrosio that she has disguised herself to be near him.

Mathilda is the very image of the picture of the Virgin to which Ambrosio is so devoted, and, through her virginal beauty, seduces Ambrosio into a degrading sexual entanglement that is fully described. As Mathilda grows more obsessed with Ambrosio, his ardor cools. To secure him to her, she offers help in seducing Antonia, another virginal beauty, Ambrosio’s newest passion. Mathilda, the madonna-faced enchantress, now reveals that she is actually a female demon. She puts her supernatural powers at Ambrosio’s disposal, and together they successfully abduct Antonia, although only after killing Antonia’s mother. Ambrosio then rapes Antonia in the foul, suffocating stench of a charnel house in the cathedral catacombs. In this scene of heavy breathing and sadism, the monk is incited to his deed by the virginal Antonia’s softness and her pleas for her virtue. Each tear excites him further into a frenzy, which he climaxes by strangling the girl.

Ambrosio’s deeds are discovered, and he is tried by an inquisitorial panel. Mathilda reveals his union with Satan through her. The novel ends with Satan’s liberation of Ambrosio from the dungeon into which the inquisitors have thrown him. Satan mangles Ambrosio’s body by throwing him into an abyss but does not let him die for seven days (the de-creation of the world?). During this time, Ambrosio must suffer the physical and psychological torments of his situation, and the reader along with him. The devil triumphs at the end of this novel. All means of redressing virtue are abandoned, and the reader is left in the abyss with Ambrosio.

Melmoth the Wanderer

The same may be said of Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer , a tale of agony and the failure of redemption. The book may be called a novel only if one employs the concept of the picaresque in its broadest sense. It is a collection of short stories, each centering on Melmoth, a damned, Faust-like character. Each tale concerns Melmoth’s attempt to find someone to change places with him, a trade he would gladly make, as he has sold his soul to the devil and now wishes to be released.

The book rubs the reader’s nerves raw with obsessive suffering, detailing scenes from the Spanish Inquisition that include the popping of bones and the melting of eyeballs. The book also minutely details the degradation of a beautiful, virginal island maiden named Immalee, who is utterly destroyed by the idolatrous love of Melmoth. The last scene of the book ticks the seconds of the clock as Melmoth, unable to find a surrogate, awaits his fall into Satan’s clutches. The denouement is an almost unbearable agony that the reader is forced to endure with the protagonist. Again the horror is eternal. There will never be any quietus for either Ambrosio or Melmoth, or for the reader haunted by them. These are the molds for the gothic of damnation.

The Modernization of the Gothic

The reading public of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries was avid for both horror and terror, as well as for supernatural history. Such works were gobbled greedily as they rolled off the presses. Indeed, the readers of the gothic may have begun the mass marketing of literature by ensuring the fortunes of the private lending libraries that opened in response to the gothic binge. Although the libraries continued after the gothic wave had crested, it was this craze that gave the libraries their impetus. Such private lending libraries purchased numerous copies of long lists of gothic works and furnished subscribers with a list from which they might choose. Like contemporary book clubs, the libraries vied for the most appetizing authors. Unlike the modern clubs, books circulated back and forth, not to be kept by subscribers.

William Lane’s Minerva Public Library was the most famous and most successful of all these libraries. Lane went after the works of independent gothic authors but formed the basis of his list by maintaining his own stable of hacks. The names of most of the “stable authors” are gone, and so are their books, but the titles linger on in the library records, echoing one another and the titles of the more prominent authors: The Romance Castle (1791), The Black Forest: Or, The Cavern of Horrors (1802), The Mysterious Omen: Or, Awful Retribution (1812).

By the time Melmoth the Wanderer had appeared, this trend had run its course. Only hacks continued to mine the old pits for monks, nuns, fainting innocents, Apennine banditti, and Satanic quests, but critics agree that if the conventions of the gothic period from Walpole to Maturin have dried out and fossilized, the spirit is very much alive. Many modern novels set miles from an abbey and containing not one shrieking, orphaned virgin or worm-ridden corpse may be considered gothic. If the sophisticated cannot repress a snicker at the obvious and well-worn gothic conventions, they cannot dismiss the power and attraction of its spirit, which lives today in serious literature.

Modern thinking about gothic literature has gravitated toward the psychological aspects of the gothic. The castle or ruined abbey has become the interior of the mind, racked with anxiety and unbridled surges of emotion, melodramatically governed by polarities. The traditional gothic is now identified as the beginning of neurotic literature. In a perceptive study of the genre, Love, Misery, and Mystery: Feeling in Gothic Fiction (1978), Coral Ann Howells points out that the gothic literature of the eighteenth century was willing to deal with the syntax of hysteria, which the more prestigious literature, controlled by classical influences, simply denied or avoided. Hysteria is no stranger to all kinds of literature, but thinking today seeks to discriminate between the literary presentation of hysteria or neuroticism as an aberration from a rational norm and the gothic presentation of neuroticism as equally normative with rational control, or even as the dominant mode.

The evolution of the modern gothic began close to the original seedbed, in the works of Edgar Allan Poe. In “The Fall of the House of Usher,” for example, the traditional sins of the gothic past cavort in a mansion of ancient and noble lineage. A young virgin is subjected to the tortures of the charnel house; the tomb and the catacombs descend directly from Lewis. So, too, do the hyperbolic physical states of pallor and sensory excitement. This tale is also marked, however, by the new relationship it seeks to demonstrate between reason and hysterical anxiety.

Roderick Usher’s boyhood friend, the story’s narrator, is a representative of the normative rational world. He is forced to encounter a reality in which anxiety and dread are the norm and in which the passions know no rational bounds. Reason is forced to confront the reality of hysteria, its horror, terror, and power. This new psychological development of the gothic is stripped of the traditional gothic appurtenances in Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart,” where there are neither swooning virgins nor charnel houses, nor ruined, once-great edifices, save the ruin of the narrator’s mind. The narrator’s uncontrollable obsessions both to murder and to confess are presented to stun the reader with the overwhelming force of anxiety unconditioned by rational analysis.

Thus, a more modern gothic focuses on the overturning of rational limits as the source of horror and dread, without necessarily using the conventional apparatus. More examples of what may be considered modern gothic can be found in the works of Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864). Although Hawthorne was perfectly capable of using the conventional machinery of the gothic, as in The House of the Seven Gables (1851), he was one of the architects of the modern gothic. In Hawthorne’s forward-looking tales, certain combinations of personalities bond, as if they were chemical compounds, to form anxiety systems that cannot be resolved except by the destruction of all or part of the human configuration. In The Scarlet Letter (1850), for example, the configuration of Hester, Chillingsworth, and Dimmesdale forms an interlocking system of emotional destruction that is its own Otranto. The needs and social positions of each character in this trio impinge on one another in ways that disintegrate “normal” considerations of loyalty, courage, sympathy, consideration, and judgment. Hester’s vivacity is answered in Dimmesdale, whose violently clashing aloofness and responsiveness create for her a vicious cycle of fulfillment and rejection. Chillingsworth introduces further complications through another vicious cycle of confidence and betrayal. These are the catacombs of the modern gothic.

Another strand of the modern gothic can be traced to Frankenstein (1818), by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (1979-1851). The novel was published just as the gothic genre was on the wane. Shelley’s story represents an important alternative for the gothic imagination. The setting in this work shifts from the castle to the laboratory, forming the gothic tributary of science fiction. Frankenstein reverses the anxiety system of the gothic from the past to the future. Instead of the sins of the fathers—old actions, old human instincts rising to blight the present—human creativity is called into question as the blight of the future. Frankenstein’s mind and laboratory are the gothic locus of “future fear,” a horror of the dark side of originality and birth, which may, as the story shows, be locked into a vicious cycle with death and sterility. A dread of the whole future of human endeavor pursues the reader in and out of the dark corridors of Frankenstein .

Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) may be considered an example of a further evolution of the gothic. Here one finds a strong resurgence of the traditional gothic: the ruined castle, bandits ranging over craggy hills, the sins of the past attacking the life of the present, and swooning, morbidly detailed accounts of deaths. The attendant supernatural horror and the bloodletting of the vampires, their repulsive stench, and the unearthly attractiveness of Dracula’s vampire brides come right out of the original school of Schauer-Romantik horror. The utterly debilitating effect of the vampire on human will is, however, strong evidence for those critics who see the gothic tradition as an exploration of neurosis.

Stoker synthesizes two major gothic subclassifications in his work, thereby producing an interesting affirmation. Unlike the works of Radcliffe and her terror school, Dracula does not ultimately affirm the power of human reason, for it never explains away the supernatural. On the other hand, Stoker does not invoke his vampires as totally overwhelming forces, as in the horror school. Dracula does not present a fatalistic course of events through which the truth will not win out. Humankind is the agency of its salvation, but only through its affirmation of the power of faith. Reason is indeed powerless before Dracula, but Dr. Van Helsing’s enormous faith and the faith he inspires in others are ultimately sufficient to resolve gothic anxiety, without denying its terrifying power and reality.

The Gothic in the Twentieth Century and Later

Significantly, in the contemporary gothic, reason never achieves the triumph it briefly found through the terror school. Twentieth and twenty-first century gothic tends toward the Schauer-Romantik school of horror. Either it pessimistically portrays an inescapable, mindforged squirrel cage, or it optimistically envisions an apocalyptic release through faith, instinct, or imagination, the nonrational human faculties. For examples of both twentieth century gothic trends, it may be instructive to consider briefly William Faulkner (1897-1962), whose works are frequently listed at the head of what is called the southern gothic tradition, and Doris Lessing (1919 – 2013 ), whose later works took a turn that brought them into the fold of the science-fiction branch of gothic. If there remains any doubt about the respectability of the genre and its writers, it may be noted here that both Faulkner and Lessing are winners of the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Faulkner’s fictions have all the characteristic elements of the southern gothic: the traditional iconography; decaying mansions and graveyards; morbid, deathoriented actions and images; sins of the past; and virgins. The Sound and the Fury (1929) is concerned with the decaying Compson house and family, the implications of past actions, and Quentin’s morbid preoccupation with death and virginity; it features Benjy’s graveyard and important scenes in a cemetery. As I Lay Dying (1930) is structured around a long march to the cemetery with a stinking corpse. Absalom, Absalom! (1936) is full of decaying houses and lurid death scenes and features prominently three strange virgins—Rosa Coldfield, Judith Sutpen, and Clytie—or five if Quentin and Shreve are to be counted. In this work, the past eats the present up alive and the central figure, Thomas Sutpen, is much in the tradition of the charismatic, but boundlessly appropriating, gothic villain.

These cold gothic externals are only superficial images that betray the presence of the steaming psychological modern gothic centers of these works. Like Hawthorne, Faulkner creates interfacing human systems of neurosis whose inextricable coils lock each character into endless anxiety, producing hysteria, obsession, and utter loss of will and freedom. The violence and physical hyperbole in Faulkner reveal the truly gothic dilemmas of the characters, inaccessible to the mediations of active reason. As in Hawthorne, the combinations of characters form the catacombs of an inescapable though invisible castle or charnel house. Through these catacombs Faulkner’s characters run, but they cannot extricate themselves and thus simply revolve in a maze of involuted thought. The Compsons bind one another to tragedy, as do the Sutpens and their spiritual and psychological descendants.

There is, however, an alternative in the modern gothic impulse. In her insightful, imaginative study of the modern evolution of the gothic, Ghosts of the Gothic: Austen, Eliot, and Lawrence (1980), Judith Wilt assigns Lessing a place as the ultimate inheritor of the tradition. Lessing does portray exotic states of anxiety, variously descending into the netherworld ( Briefing for a Descent into Hell , 1971) and plunging into outer space (the Canopus in Argos series), but Wilt focuses on The Four-Gated City (1969). This novel has both the trappings and the spirit of the gothic. The book centers on a doomed old house and an old, traditional family succumbing to the sins of the past. These Lessing portrays as no less than the debilitating sins of Western culture, racist, sexist, and exploitive in character. Lessing does indeed bring down this house. Several of the major characters are released from doom, however, by an apocalyptic World War III that wipes away the old sins, freeing some characters for a new, fruitful, life without anxiety. Significantly, this new world will be structured not on the principles of reason and logic, which Lessing excoriates as the heart of the old sins, but on the basis of something innately nonrational and hard to identify. It is not instinct and not faith, but seems closest to imagination. Lessing’s ultimately hopeful vision, it must be conceded, is not shared by most contemporary practitioners of the genre. The gothic enjoyed a resurgence in the 1980’s that critics identified as a significant literary trend. Typical of the diversity of writers mentioned under this rubric are those represented in a collection edited by Patrick McGrath (born 1950): The New Gothic: A Collection of Contemporary Gothic Fiction (1991; with Bradford Morrow). McGrath, himself a writer of much-praised gothic fictions, assembled work by veteran novelists such as Robert Coover and John Hawkes as well as younger (now established) writers such as Jamaica Kincaid and William T. Vollmann; the group includes both the best-selling novelist Peter Straub and the assaultive experimental novelist Kathy Acker. These works were first collected by McGrath in the journal Conjunctions (1989), in which he contributed an essay outlining some of the characteristics of the new gothic. While resisting any attempt at rigid definition (the gothic, he says, is “an air, a tone, a tendency”; it is “not a monolith”), he acknowledges that all the writers whom he places in this group “concern themselves variously with extremes of sexual experience, with disease and social power, with murder and terror and death.” That much might be said about most gothic novelists from the beginnings of the genre. What perhaps differentiates many of the writers whom McGrath discusses from their predecessors—what makes the new gothic new—is a more self-consciously transgressive stance, evident in McGrath’s summation of the vision that he and his fellow writers share.

Common to all is an idea of evil, transgression of natural and social law, and the gothic, in all its suppleness, is the literature that permits that mad dream to be dreamt in a thousand forms.

Among popular-fiction writers, the gothic split into two main genres, one based on supernatural or psychological horror and the other based on women’s fiction, featuring romance and, often, historical settings. Moreover, combinations of the two traditions most approach the hyperreal intensity and blend of fear and passion seen in the original gothic: for example, the saga of the Dollanganger family by V. C. Andrews (1923-1986) or the Blood Opera series— Dark Dance (1992), Personal Darkness (1993), and Darkness, I (1994)—by Tanith Lee (1947-2015). While horror writers often substitute the suburbs or small town for the isolated castle—and sometimes psychic abilities, deranged computers, or psychotic killers for ghostly nuns and predatory villain-heroes—they continue to explore the intense feeling, perilous world, tense social situations, and alluring but corrupt sexuality of the original gothic. Unlike the romantic gothic, which has seen periods of quiescence and revival, an unbroken line of the horror gothic persisted from The Castle of Otranto through Dracula and into the twentieth century with books such as Ghost Stories of an Antiquary (1904), by M. R. James (1862-1936), and the works of Walter de la Mare (1873-1956) and H. P. Lovecraft (1890-1937). These stories continue the trend—seen in Poe, Hawthorne, Faulkner, and others—of maintaining morbid and sensational gothic elements while rooting the terror in psychology and even epistemology. Often, hauntings reveal, or are even replaced by, obsession and paranoia. Before the burgeoning of the modern commercial horror novel, Shirley Jackson (1916-1965), in two eerie and lyrical novels, The Haunting of Hill House (1959) and We Have Always Lived in the Castle (1962), uses the traditional gothic form and many of its motifs, with both psychological sophistication and true terror. Robert Bloch (1917-1994), with his novel Psycho (1959), also updates and psychologizes gothic conventions, substituting an out-of-the-way motel for a castle and explicitly invoking Sigmund Freud . The horror genre grew with the (arguably) gothic novel The Exorcist (1971), by William Peter Blatty (1928-2017), and with Rosemary’s Baby (1967), by Ira Levin (1929-2007). The novel transplants to a New York City apartment building the hidden secret, supernatural menace, and conspiracies against the heroine of early gothics. Although the horror market withered in the 1990’s, four best-selling authors continued in the gothichorror vein: Dean R. Koontz (born 1945), Straub, Stephen King (born 1947), and Anne Rice (born 1941). While much of Koontz’s horror is better classified as horror-adventure, lacking the brooding neuroses and doubts about rationality prevalent in gothic fiction, gothic aspects do dominate his novels Whispers (1980), Shadowfires (1987), Dean Koontz’s Frankenstein: Prodigal Son (2005; with Kevin J. Anderson), Dean Koontz’s Frankenstein: City of Night (2005; with Edward Gorman), and Dean Koontz’s Frankenstein: Dead or Alive (2007; with Gorman). Koontz’s Demon Seed (1973) exemplifies the techno-gothic: A threatening setting and pursuing lover combine in a robot intelligence, which runs the house and wants to impregnate the heroine. Rice explores the gothic’s lush, dangerous sexuality and burden of the past in the novels of the Vampire Chronicles, including Interview with the Vampire (1976), The Vampire Lestat (1985), The Tale of the Body Thief (1992), Memnoch the Devil (1995), Blood and Gold: Or, The Story of Marius (2001), and Blood Canticle (2003).

Straub’s Julia (1975; also known as Full Circle), is a drawing-room gothic novel, focusing on the haunting— supernatural, mentally pathological, or both—of a woman dominated by her husband and his disturbing, enmeshed family. In Ghost Story (1979), Shadowland (1980), and others, Straub widens the focus, exploring and critiquing the small town, boys’ school, or suburban setting while developing gothic themes, including dangerous secrets, guilt, ambivalent eroticism, and a threat from the past. In Lost Boy, Lost Girl (2003), the threats include a pedophile serial killer, a haunted house, and a missing man’s obsession with his dead mother. Straub explores other genres as well, especially the mystery, but maintains a gothic tone and intensity.

Similarly, King ’s early work is more strictly gothic, such as ’Salem’s Lot (1975), in which vampires spread through a small town in Maine, and The Shining (1977), a story of madness and terror in an isolated, empty hotel. However, many later works, even mimetic ones such as Gerald’s Game (1992), Dolores Claiborne (1993), Bag of Bones (1998), From a Buick Eight (2002), and Cell (2006), continue gothic themes and often a gothic tone. King is the undisputed best-selling author of the genre, having sold more than 330 million copies of his novels. Straub and King, admirers of one another’s work, have collaborated on two fantasy novels, The Talisman (1984), and a sequel, Black House (2001).

The prolific Joyce Carol Oates (born 1938), author of more than fifty novels, has created several memorable gothic works, including a Gothic Saga series comprising Bellefleur (1980) and its sequels. Another memorable work is Zombie (1995), an exploration of the mind of a serial killer, based on the life of Jeffrey Dahmer. New voices on the gothic-novel scene include Donna Tartt (born c. 1964), author of The Secret History (1992) and The Little Friend (2002), and Elizabeth Kostova (born 1964), whose first novel, The Historian (2005), became a best seller and was translated into close to thirty languages.

Along with terror and horror, sentimental and romantic elements were established in the original gothic in the works of Ann Radcliffe, Clara Reeve, Susanna Rowson (1762-1824), and the Brontë sisters. In 1938, Rebecca , by Daphne du Maurier (1907-1989), the story of a young woman’s marriage to a wealthy English widower with a secret, conveyed many gothic conventions to a new audience, paving the way for the genre of gothic romance. Combining mystery, danger, and romantic fantasy, such books tend to feature innocent but admirable heroines, a powerful male love interest and his isolated estate, ominous secrets (often linked to a woman from the love interest’s past, as in Rebecca), and exotic settings that are remote in place and time.

In the early 1960’s, editor Gerald Gross of Ace Books used the term “gothic” for a line of paperbacks aimed at women, featuring primarily British authors such as Victoria Holt (pseudonym for Eleanor Alice Burford Hibbert, 1906-1993), Phyllis A. Whitney (1903-2008), and Dorothy Eden (1912-1982). The mystery and love plots are inextricable, and the novels feature many gothic elements, including besieged heroines; strong, enigmatic men; settings that evoke an atmosphere of tension and justified paranoia; heightened emotional states; doubled characters (including impersonation); and lurid, sometimes cruel, sexuality. In the 1970’s and later, erotic elements flourished and became more explicit, resulting in the new category of the erotic gothic.

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Postmodern Gothic

Source : Rollyson, Carl. Critical Survey Of Long Fiction . 4th ed. New Jersey: Salem Press, 2010. Bibliography Brown, Marshall. The Gothic Text. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2005. Ellis, Markman. The History of Gothic Fiction. New York: Columbia University Press, 2000. Frank, Frederick S. Guide to the Gothic. Lanham, Md.: Scarecrow Press, 1984. _______. Guide to the Gothic II. Lanham, Md.: Scarecrow Press, 1995. Geary, Robert F. The Supernatural in Gothic Fiction: Horror, Belief, and Literary Change. Lewiston, N.Y.: Edwin Mellen Press, 1992. Haggerty, George E. Queer Gothic. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006. Jackson, Anna, Karen Coats, and Roderick McGillis, eds. The Gothic in Children’s Literature: Haunting the Borders. New York: Routledge, 2007. Kilgour, Maggie. The Rise of the Gothic Novel. Reprint. New York: Routledge, 1997. Mussell, Kay. Women’s Gothic and Romantic Fiction: A Reference Guide. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1981. Norton, Rictor, ed. Gothic Readings: The First Wave, 1764-1840. Reprint. New York: Leicester University Press, 2006. Punter, David, and Glennis Byron. The Gothic. Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2004. Punter, David, ed. A Companion to the Gothic. Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2000. Varma, Devendra P. The Gothic Flame: Being a History of the Gothic Novel in England—Its Origins, Efflorescence, Disintegration, and Residuary Influences. Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1987. Wright, Angela. Gothic Fiction. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007.

Gothic literature

Part of English Critical reading

What do you know?

Which famous Gothic novel was first written as an entry for a ghost story writing competition?

A. Dracula B. The Woman in Black C. Frankenstein

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The answer is C. Frankenstein .

Mary Shelley was stuck inside due to bad weather whilst staying in Geneva with her husband Percy Bysshe Shelley and their friends Lord Byron and John Polidori. They decided to pass the time by writing and telling ghost stories and Frankenstein was created!

Introduction to Gothic literature

Key learning points.

In order to fully understand Gothic literature, it is important to know where it came from and why it became such a popular fiction genre close genre A type or category of fiction. .

When analysing gothic texts it's important to understand the context and conventions close conventions Features of a genre of writing. of Gothic literature so you can apply them to the text you're reading.

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A video about the conventions in theme and character found in gothic literature

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Gothic literature evokes an atmosphere of mystery, fear or terror.

The gothic genre was really popular during the 1800s with Frankenstein , Wuthering Heights and Dracula . But there were stories with Gothic elements before and there have been plenty since. So could you survive the dark world of a gothic novel?

First up, you’ll need to wrap up warm. There aren’t many tropical beaches in gothic fiction. Expect wind, rain and thunderstorms and things that go bump in the night. Night time settings appeal to reader’s instinctive fear of the dark - and under the cover of darkness things often aren’t quite as they seem.

Writers typically set their stories in abandoned or isolated locations like crumbling castles, windswept moors, places of decay and death. Places with seemingly no escape. But where there are also plenty of secrets with underground passages and hidden doors. This all adds to the sense of mystery and danger.

Typical gothic themes are the supernatural, science, revenge, religion, breaking societal norms and the battle between good and evil. These themes and impending bad fortune are often hinted at in the gothic novels through ominous warnings or symbolic omens, such as a full moon or a raven.

Gothic literature often contrasts different types of characters: victims and predators, good and evil. They are full of strange and often supernatural characters like ghosts, vampires and werewolves. Or sometimes it’s humans that seem to have something different about them, they might have special senses or abilities.

These settings, themes and characters combine to create creepy worlds and nasty narratives that send a shiver down the reader’s spine.

Eek! Good luck.

What is Gothic literature?

Gothic literature is a genre of fiction which first became popular during the 18th century.

Although many of the most famous Gothic novels were written during the Victorian times, conventions of the Gothic genre are still featured in popular culture today.

The term ‘Gothic’ originates from the name of an ancient Germanic tribe (The Goths) who are thought to have contributed to the fall of the Roman Empire. They had a reputation for being barbaric and later a form of architecture close architecture The particular design and structure of buildings - Gothic architecture is decorative and ornate with height and grandeur, gargoyles, pointed arches and vaulted ceilings. was named after them as sort of insult.

The term Gothic first became linked to literature with Horace Walpole's 1764 novel The Castle of Otranto , later subtitled A Gothic Story . This term was probably given because of the book's medieval Gothic architecture and setting.

Gothic literature timeline

1764 - The Castle of Otranto: The first Gothic novel

Horace Walpole created what is considered to be the first Gothic novel. The Castle of Otranto introduced Gothic themes, locations and characters such as supernatural beings, an unfamiliar location, a dark and isolated castle and an innocent young woman fleeing from an evil man.

1794 - The Mysteries of Udolpho

Ann Radcliffe introduced ‘the explained supernatural’, a technique by which terrifying, apparently supernatural incidents have a logical explanation. An innocent woman goes to live with her aunt, who marries a suspicious nobleman. They are taken to live in his remote castle whilst the husband and his friend plot to gain control of the women’s wealth.

Three men stood around a metal medical bed in a laboratory, with a man with huge feet laying on the bed with his arms folded.

1818 - Frankenstein: Raising the dead

Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein features many Gothic elements, including raising the dead. Due to the fact that a creature is brought to life, it is also considered to be in the science fiction genre. The use of electricity and playing with death means that it could be interpreted as a warning about the dangers of science.

An image of an overweight, smartly dressed man in dark clothes, standing over the bed where a woman in a white dress lies unconscious.

1860 - The Woman in White

This novel by Wilkie Collins includes the themes of mistaken identity, apparent insanity and that things are not always as they seem. It plays on the fear of women being locked in asylums if they were ‘in the way’ – a commonplace occurrence in the 1800s. The characters include a broken hero, an innocent female and an evil villain.

A well dressed man points excitedly and another well dress man listens, whilst a deformed hunched over man in bedraggled clothes appears from the second well dressed man.

1886 - Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde

Robert Louis Stevenson explored the nature of good and evil. The novella has the Gothic theme of the double: the contrast between good and evil in people or places. It tells the story of the ‘good’ Doctor Jekyll and the ‘evil’ Mr Hyde and the mystery of a strange transformation.

A man with dark hair and a black and white suit with a black cape leans over a woman asleep in bed.

1897 - Dracula: The iconic vampire

Bram Stoker’s famous vampire is introduced. The tale of the Transylvanian count transferred well to screen and was made into many different films, dominating our idea of how vampires look and behave. This Gothic novel includes a remote castle, supernatural beings, innocent victims and the theme of good v evil.

A man and a woman stand in an enormous room with a large fire place surrounded by a large number of unsmiling house staff.

1938 - Rebecca

The novel Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier is told by an unnamed narrator who is the new wife of a wealthy widower. Rebecca is the name of his first wife and it becomes clear that she was loved by the staff in the house, so much so, that they try to belittle and push the narrator away. Gothic motifs include an innocent woman, an isolated mansion and dark hidden truths.

A photograph of a woman dressed in black, sat in a room surrounded by dolls

1976 - Interview with the Vampire

Writer Anne Rice (pictured) establishes the idea of the ‘sympathetic vampire'. The guilt-ridden vampire narrator Louis doesn’t like killing humans and initially only feeds on animals. The charismatic anti-hero Lestat is scared of being alone and turns a young girl into a vampire for company. Louis tells his sad tale of loneliness and immortality to a reporter who misses the point and decides that it sounds like a great lifestyle which angers Louis.

A woman from the back in a clack flowing dress and black veil.

1983 - The Woman in Black

This novel by Susan Hill is narrated by a solicitor who was sent to a secluded house to settle the will of an elderly lady. At high tide, the house is cut off from the mainland and the man experiences strange sightings of a woman dressed in black and searches for the truth behind these appearances. It features the unknown, the supernatural, a haunting, an innocent victim and is based in an isolated setting.

A picture of a man and a woman staring blankly towards the camera

2005 - The Twilight Saga

The Twilight Saga is a series of novels and one novella by the author Stephenie Meyer. This series covers many of the traditional Gothic elements together with a love story, supernatural beings, such as shapeshifters and vampires, and the theme of good v evil.

Features of the Gothic genre

Gothic literature can be recognised by its use of particular features, settings and characters.

Common conventions of the Gothic genre include the following:

Gothic motifs

Gothic Novel | Definition, Characteristics, History, Essay, Examples in Literature

Gothic Novel in Literature

Table of Contents

Gothic Novel Definition

Gothic Novel is a “genre of fiction characterized by mystery and supernatural horror, often set in a dark castle or other medieval setting.” Such novel is pseudo-medieval fiction with a prevailing atmosphere of mystery and terror. Gothic novel is sometimes referred to as Gothic horror. It is a genre or mode of literature that combines elements of both horror and romance .

Gothicism ‘s origin is attributed to English author Horace Walpole, with his 1764 novel The Castle of Otranto , subtitled “A Gothic Story “. The Gothic novel was a branch of the larger Romantic movement that sought to stimulate strong emotions in the reader – fear and apprehension in this case.’ Such novel takes its name from medieval architecture, as it often hearkens back to the medieval era in spirit and subject matter and often uses Gothic buildings as a setting. The effect of Gothic fiction feeds on a pleasing sort of terror. It is an extension of Romantic literary pleasures that were relatively new at the time of Walpole’s novel. Melodrama and parody (including self-parody) are other long-standing features of the Gothic initiated by Walpole.

Historical Background of Gothic

The Goths were one of the many Germanic tribes. They fought numerous battles with the Roman Empire for centuries. According to their own myths, as narrated by Jordanes, a Gothic historian from the mid 6th century, the Goths originated in what is now southern Sweden, but their king Berig led them to the southern shore of the Baltic Sea. Later Goths separated into twongroups, the Visigoths (the West Goths) and Ostrogoths (the East Goths). They were named so because of the place where they finally settled.

They reached the height of their utmost power around 5th century A.D., when they sacked Rome and captured Spain, but their history finally subsumed under that of the countries they conquered (“Goths”). During the Renaissance, Europeans rediscovered Greco-Roman culture. They began to regard a particular type of architecture, mainly those built during the middle Ages, as “gothic.” It was not because of any connection to the Goths, but because the ‘Uomo Universale’ considered these buildings “barbaric” and definitely not in that Classical style. Centuries more passed before “gothic” came to describe a certain type of novels . This was named so because all these novels seem to take place in Gothic-styled architecture which was mainly castles, mansions, and abbeys.

Gothic Novel Characteristics

Setting in a castle or Mansions

An atmosphere of mystery and suspense pervaded by threatening feeling

An ancient and obscure prophecy may be connected with the castle or its inhabitants (either former or present).

Character may have Omens, portents, visions.

Supernatural or otherwise inexplicable and dramatic events may occur.

Characters may have high, even overwrought emotion resulting in crying and emotional speeches.

Female characters are often in distress and are oppressed in order to gain sympathy of the readers.

Women are threatened by a powerful and tyrannical male.

The metonymy of gloom and horror. Metonymy is a subtype of metaphor, in which something (like rain) is used to stand for something else (like sorrow). For example, the film industry likes to use metonymy as a quick shorthand, so we often notice that it is raining in funeral scenes.

A peculiar glossary of the gothic novels for mystery, fear, terror, surprise, haste anger or largeness for creating the atmosphere.

Gothic Novel Examples

Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764) is often regarded as the first true Gothic romance . Walpole was obsessed with medieval Gothic architecture, and built his own house, Strawberry Hill, in that form, sparking a fashion for Gothic revival. A few good examples of Gothic fiction are Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) and The Italian (1797). Matthew Gregory Lewis’s The Monk (1796) was the book that introduced more horrific elements into the English gothic. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstei n (1818) and Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) are fine examples of gothic novels .

Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein as a Gothic Novel

Gothic Novel: An Essay

The Gothic fiction , however, enjoyed its heyday from 1762 to 1820 and influenced and inspired the sensational writers of the late nineteenth century. Certain merits of the Gothic fiction have been recognised by the Freudian psychologists. Herbert Read in his book Surrealism remarks: “It is possible that Monk Lewis, Maturin and Mrs. Radcliffe should relatively to Scott, Dickens and Hardy occupy a much higher rank.” He had defended the Gothic fiction against the objections that the plots of these novels are fictitious, that the characters are unreal and the sentiments that excite are morbid,

“All these judgements merely reflect our prejudices. It is proper for a work of imagination to be fictitious, and for characters to be typical rather than realistic.”

Dr. D. P. Varma in his book “ The Gothic Flame ” observes : “The Gothic novel is a conception as vast and complex as a Gothic Cathedral. One finds in it the same sinister overtone and the same solemn grandeur.” According to Montague Summers ( The Gothic Quest ), Gothic was the essence of romanticism, and romanticism was the literary expression of supernaturalism. As a matter of fact, the Gothic fiction was a profound reaction against the long domination of reason and authority. The Gothic novelists enlarged the sense of reality and its impact on human beings. It acknowledged the nonrational in the world of things and events, occasionally in the realm of transcendental, ultimately and most persistently in the depth of the human being. The application of Freudian psychology to literature has altered our attitude to the Gothic romances. The suppressed neurotic and erotic of educated society are reflected in the Gothic romances.

“The scenes of no in the Gothic fiction may have been the harmless release of that innate sp of cruelty which is present in each of us, an impulse mysterious inextricable connected with the very forces of life and death”

(Prof. Varma)

The Gothic fiction has a resemblance to the Gothic Architecture . The weird and eerie atmosphere of Gothic fiction was derived from the Gothic architecture which evoked feelings of horror, wildness, suspense and gloom. The stimulation of fear and the probing of the mysterious provided the raison d’etre of the Gothic novelists who took an important part in liberating the emotional energies that had been so long restrained by common sense and good form.

A number of influences contributed to the growth of the Gothic novel in the eighteenth century. It developed against the spirit of the Age of Reason and the stern warning of Dr. Johnson. The Gothic novel owes particularly to the picturesque antiquarianism, ruins and graveyard sentiment. Kenneth Clark in The Gothic Revival says : The Gothic novelists were the natural successors to the Graveyard poets. In the 18th century , the ghost stories were wide in circulation and people showed interest in questions of life, death, the occult, magic and astrology. The popularity of Spenser, Shakespeare and Milton intensified people’s belief in the supernatural. The Gothic novelists were inspired by the examples of Italy, France and Germany and by the oriental allegory or moral apologue of the east. Addison’s The Vision of Mirza (1711) and Johnson’s Rasselas (1759) gave some colour to Gothic romance .

Horace Walpole was the pioneer in Gothic fiction. Walpole’s sensitive imagination and dreaming mind absorbed the spirit of romanticism. His antiquarian interests caught the Gothic spirit–the romantic setting the continuous spell of horror, the colour of melancholy, awe and superstition which blossomed in The Castle of Otranto (1764). The Gothic romance is a horror novel in which we have walking skeletons, pictures that move out of their frames and their blood-curdling incidents. The ghostly machinery is often cumbrous but as a return to the romantic elements of mystery and fear, the book is noteworthy. Diana Neill, however, dismisses the book as amusing rather than frightening. Virginia Woolf in an article stated, “Walpole had imagination, taste, style in addition to a passion for the romantic past.” Miss Clara Reeve wrote many Gothic romances, the chief of them being

‘The Old English Baron’. She was the first Gothic novelist to make use of dreams. Miss Clara Reeve, however, lacked vivid imagination. Montague Summers condemns The Old English Baron as a “dull and didactic narrative told in a style of chilling mediocrity.”

Mrs. Ann Radcliffe , the wife of an Oxford graduate has been called “the Shakespeare of Romance writers”. Montague Summers refers to the sombre and sublime genius of Ann Radcliffe. Her romantic temperament, her passion for music and wild scenery, her love of solitude, her interest in the mysterious, her ability to arouse wonder and fear helped her in writing masterpiece in Gothic fiction. During the years 1789-1797, she wrote five romances Castles of Athlian and Dubayne , A Cicelian Romance , The Romance of the Forest , The Mysteries of Udolpho , The Italian Coleridge called The Mystery of Udolpho “the most interesting novel in the English language” . Its noble outline, its majestic and beautiful images harmonizing with the scenes exert an irresistible fascination. It gradually rises from the gentlest beauty towards the terrific and the sublime. Unlike other terror novelists, Mrs. Radcliffe rationalised the supernatural. We hear mysterious voices in the chamber of Udolpho, but we are told that they were the wanton tricks of a prisoner. She employed scenery for their own sake in the novel. Moreover, by her insight into the workings of fear, she contributed to the development of the psychological novel . She adopted the dramatic structure of the novel which influenced the Victorian novelists. Thus her influence percolated through Scott on the 19th century novel in its various aspects-psychological, romantic and structural.

Matthew Gregory Lewis made a spine-chilling and blood-curdling use of magic and necromancy and pointed the grim and ghastly themes in lurid colours. His The Monk absorbed the ghastly and crude supernaturalism of the German Romantic movement in English fiction. It is melodrama epitomised. He indulges in crude supernaturalism rising to a grotesque climax borrowed from Dr. Faustus , when a demon rescues the villain-hero from execution only to fly high in the air with him and drop him to his death cm jagged rocks.

Beckford’s Vathek is wholly a fantasy. Its air of mystery arises from supposedly unnatural causes, while a sense of horror is heightened for artistic effect. Its gorgeous style and stately descriptions, its exaltation of both poetic and moral justice relate it to the Gothic romance,

Charles Robert Maturin wrote a number of nicely constructed Gothic romances : The Fatal Revenge (1807), The Wild Irish Boy (1808). The Mebsian Chief (1872), Melmoth , The Wanderer (1820). Maturin dispensed with the spine-chilling paraphernalia of the Terror School and concentrated his attention on the suggestive and psychological handling of the stories. His acute insight into character, vivid descriptive faculty and sensitive style of writing are in the tradition of Mrs. Radcliffe; but by his unabashed of the supernatural he treads in the footsteps of Lewis. He introduces horror in the novel by the clever Radcliffian device of reticence and suggestion. His Melmoth the Wanderer may be called the swan song of Gothic fiction . After it the fashion gradually died away. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) is a remarkable Gothic novel. She employed the pseudo-scientific technique in depicting horrors in the novel. William Godwin wrote two horror novels Caleb Williams and St. Leon. He neither imitates the suggestive method of Mrs. Radcliffe, nor the gruesome horrors of Gregory Lewis, but he creates physical realistic horrors in his novels.

Gothic Literature in the Romantic Period

In both Gothic and romantic creeds there is a tendency to slip imperceptivity from the real into the other world, to demolish barriers between the physical and the psychic or supernatural. Wordsworth’s Guilt and Sorrow , Peter Bell , Coleridge’s The Ancient Mariner , Kubla Khan , Christabel , Keats’ The Eve of St. Agnes and La Belle Dame Sans Mercy , Shelley’s The Witch of Atlas are some Gothic poems influenced by the technique and devices of the Gothic fiction.

Gothic Literature in the Victorian Period

The Gothic romances have great influence on the Victorian and modern fiction. The sensational novels of Bulwar Lytton, Wilkie Collins in their emphasis on mystery and terror are a direct descent from the Gothic novels. The Bronte sisters luxuriously used the suggestive method of Radcliffe for creating the Gothic atmosphere in Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre . Walter de la Mare’s Poem The Listeners is full of gothic setting.

Gothic Literature in the Modern Period

In modern times, the fantasy of H. G. Wells , and C. S. Lewis, J . K Rowling, Edgar Allan Poe shows us worlds unknown, monstrous and horrible. The modern detective novels of Edgar Wallace and Peter Cheney are influenced by the Gothic romances. They provided a pattern and also inspired the sensational writers of to-day with the incentive that set them on the sinister paths of crime fiction.

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Southern gothic literature.

Thomas Ærvold Bjerre Thomas Ærvold Bjerre University of Southern Denmark
https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190201098.013.304
Published online: 28 June 2017

Southern Gothic is a mode or genre prevalent in literature from the early 19th century to this day. Characteristics of Southern Gothic include the presence of irrational, horrific, and transgressive thoughts, desires, and impulses; grotesque characters; dark humor, and an overall angst-ridden sense of alienation. While related to both the English and American Gothic tradition, Southern Gothic is uniquely rooted in the South’s tensions and aberrations. During the 20th century, Charles Crow has noted, the South became “the principal region of American Gothic” in literature. The Southern Gothic brings to light the extent to which the idyllic vision of the pastoral, agrarian South rests on massive repressions of the region’s historical realities: slavery, racism, and patriarchy. Southern Gothic texts also mark a Freudian return of the repressed: the region’s historical realities take concrete forms in the shape of ghosts that highlight all that has been unsaid in the official version of southern history. Because of its dark and controversial subject matter, literary scholars and critics initially sought to discredit the gothic on a national level. Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849) became the first Southern Gothic writer to fully explore the genre’s potential. Many of his best-known poems and short stories, while not placed in a recognizable southern setting, display all the elements that would come to characterize Southern Gothic.

While Poe is a foundational figure in Southern Gothic, William Faulkner (1897–1962) arguably looms the largest. His fictional Yoknapatawpha County was home to the bitter Civil War defeat and the following social, racial, and economic ruptures in the lives of its people. These transformations, and the resulting anxieties felt by Chickasaw Indians, poor whites and blacks, and aristocratic families alike, mark Faulkner’s work as deeply Gothic. On top of this, Faulkner’s complex, modernist, labyrinthine language creates in readers a similarly Gothic sense of uncertainty and alienation. The generation of southern writers after Faulkner continued the exploration of the clashes between Old and New South. Writers like Tennessee Williams (1911–1983), Carson McCullers (1917–1967), and Flannery O’Connor (1925–1964) drew on Gothic elements. O’Connor’s work is particularly steeped in the grotesque, a subgenre of the Gothic. African American writers like Zora Neale Hurston (1891–1960) and Richard Wright have had their own unique perspective on the Southern Gothic and the repressed racial tensions at the heart of the genre. Southern Gothic also frames the bleak and jarringly violent stories by contemporary so-called Rough South writers, such as Cormac McCarthy, Barry Hannah, Dorothy Allison, William Gay, and Ron Rash. A sense of evil lurks in their stories and novels, sometimes taking on the shape of ghosts or living dead, ghouls who haunt the New Casino South and serve as symbolic reminders of the many unresolved issues still burdening the South to this day.

Southern literature
Gothic literature
Southern Gothic
the U. S. South

William Faulkner

Edgar Allan Poe
Flannery O’Connor

From the Gothic to American Gothic to Southern Gothic

“Southern Gothic” is the label attached to a particular strain of literature from the American South. The style of writing has evolved from the American Gothic tradition, which again evolved from the English Gothic tradition. Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto ( 1765 ) is considered the first Gothic novel, and Ann Radcliffe is seen as a cofounder of the genre thanks to Gothic romances such as The Mysteries of Udolpho ( 1794 ) and The Italian ( 1797 ). Several scholars have attempted to categorize the Gothic: H. L. Malchow defines it not as a genre but a discourse, “a language of panic, of unreasoning anxiety.” 1 David Punter points to the themes of paranoia, the barbaric, and taboo, 2 and Allan Lloyd-Smith states that the Gothic is “about the return of the past, of the repressed and denied, the buried secret that subverts and corrodes the present, whatever the culture does not want to know or admit, will not or dare not tell itself.” 3 Specific definitions aside, Gothic literature generally challenged Enlightenment principles by giving voice to irrational, horrific, and transgressive thoughts, desires, and impulses, thereby conjuring an angst-ridden world of violence, sex, terror, and death. As Jerrold Hogle notes, since the 18th century, Gothic fiction has enabled readers to “address and disguise some of the most important desires, quandaries, and sources of anxiety, from the most internal and mental to the widely social and cultural.” 4

The Gothic finds its footing in the United States in the early 19th century. Charles Brockden Brown, the first professional American author, is credited with inventing the American Gothic novel with Wieland ( 1798 ). According to Eric Savoy, what makes Brown’s novel stand out is the way in which it “resituate[s] ‘history’ in a pathologized return of the repressed whereby the present witnesses the unfolding and fulfillment of terrible destinies incipient in the American past.” 5 Apart from Brockden Brown, scholars have found it difficult to pinpoint a foundational era or group of authors for the American Gothic. Indeed, Leslie Fiedler has argued that the American Gothic tradition is best understood as “a pathological symptom rather than a proper literary movement,” 6 and Teresa Goddu has noted “the difficulty of defining the genre in national terms.” 7 Some scholars have listed criteria in order to define the genre. Allan Lloyd Smith sees “four indigenous features” marking the American Gothic as distinct from the European version: “the frontier, the Puritan legacy, race, and political utopianism.” 8 Yet others hesitate at using the term “genre” and talk instead of the Gothic as “a discursive field in which a metonymic national ‘self’ is undone by the return of its repressed Otherness.” 9 What critics do seem to agree on, however, is the way in which American Gothic texts in general have challenged the American Dream narrative by consistently pointing out limitations and aberrations in the progressive belief in possibility and mobility. Eric Savoy points out the irony of the Gothic’s predominance in American culture. In a nation whose master narrative is grounded in rationalism, progress, and egalitarianism, Savoy points to “the odd centrality of Gothic cultural production in the United States, where the past constantly inhabits the present, where progress generates an almost unbearable anxiety about its costs, and where an insatiable appetite for spectacles of grotesque violence is part of the texture of everyday life.” 10

Nowhere in the United States is the Gothic more present than in the South, which Allison Graham describes as a “repository of national repressions … the benighted area ‘down there’ whose exposure to the light is unfailingly horrifying and thrilling.” 11 Flannery O’Connor famously declared that the so-called Southern school of literature conjured up “an image of Gothic monstrosities and the idea of a preoccupation with everything deformed and grotesque.” 12 Add to this Benjamin Fisher’s definition of the literary Gothic as something that evokes “anxieties, fears, terrors, often in tandem with violence, brutality, rampant sexual impulses, and death,” 13 and it becomes clear how the tradition of the Southern Gothic plays into already established ideas about the South as an “ill” region. This notion was established early on, as Charles Reagan Wilson has shown: the “deadly climate that nurtured diseases” and killed off early Jamestown settlers, and later colonists in Lowcountry North Carolina created an image of the South as “a death trap.” 14 Centuries later, William Faulkner, arguably the greatest Southern Gothic writer, has one of his characters in As I Lay Dying ( 1930 ) echo this view of the South: “That’s the one trouble with this country: everything, weather, all, hangs on too long. Like our rivers, our land: opaque, slow, violent; shaping and creating the life of man in its implacable and brooding image.” 15 Another central figure of Southern Gothic, Tennessee Williams, continues in the same vein, when he writes that, “there is something in the region, something in the blood and culture, of the Southern state[s] that has somehow made them the center of this Gothic school of writers.” These writers share “a sense, an intuition, of an underlying dreadfulness in modern experience.” 16

While related to both the English and American Gothic tradition, the Southern Gothic is uniquely rooted in the region’s tensions and aberrations. The United States may not have had old castles in which writers could place their Gothic romances, but after the Civil War, the many often ruined or decaying plantations and mansions in the South became uncanny locations for Gothic stories about sins, secrets, and the “haunting history” of the South. 17 And while Southern Gothic can be said to fulfill the criteria set out by scholars like Punter and Smith, increasingly, Gothic in an American context has come to connote the American South. During the 20th century, the South became “the principal region of American Gothic” in literature. 18 As Charles L. Crow points out, the term “Southern Gothic” “became so common in the modern period that each word came to evoke the other,” 19 as southern writers increasingly explored a region burdened with contradictory images. On the one hand, the colonial and antebellum South has been constructed as a pastoral idyll, an agrarian garden free of toil. On the other hand, the South has been seen as a repository for all of America’s shortcomings: a region of sickness and backwardness symbolized by everything from yellow fever and hookworm disease to personal and societal violence.

Southern Gothic brings to light the extent to which the vision of the idyllic South rests on massive repressions of the region’s historical realities: slavery, racism, and patriarchy. In this way, Southern Gothic texts mark a Freudian return of the repressed: the region’s historical realities take concrete forms in the shape of ghosts or grotesque figures that highlight all that has been unsaid in the official version of southern history. Leslie Fiedler’s claim that the “proper subject for American gothic is the black man, from whose shadow we have not yet emerged” 20 helps explain the propensity, the pull of the Gothic in southern literature. Its uncanny and haunted effects echo the old Gothic tradition but serve as a specific comment on southern life and customs.

The Southern Grotesque

A subgenre or additional aspect of Southern Gothic is the grotesque, also called Southern Grotesque. Scholars have long argued about the differences between the two terms, and many simply equate the two and use them interchangeably. As Charles Crow notes, the grotesque, “is a quality that overlaps with the Gothic, but neither is necessary or sufficient for the other.” 21 Characters with physical deformities, so-called freaks, feature heavily in the Southern Grotesque. Often, their physical disfigurements—limps, wooden legs, cross-eyes, crippled limbs—serve as markers of a corrupt moral compass and point to the ways in which writers of Southern Gothic engage with the discrepancy between perceived, heteronormative normalcy and the repressed realities beneath that assumption. While deformed characters may be one of the most evident markers of Southern Gothic, 22 the grotesque has been credited with invoking everything from “horror and the uncanny” to “sadness, compassion or humour.” 23 The apparent breadth of grotesque traits threatens to empty the term of any useful meaning. But what unites the many features of the grotesque as well as its effects is a disturbing juxtaposition of conflicting elements; a site of transgression that serves to challenge the normative status quo, which in the South has been particularly repressive when it comes to race, gender, and sexuality. This links the Southern Grotesque to Mikhail Bakhtin’s notion of the carnivalesque, which, among other things, functions as a strategy of transgression, resistance, and disruption. 24 This disruption that the grotesque produces is not of the “aberrant body,” as Melissa Free argues, “but of the social body that silences and condemns deviance.” 25 Flannery O’Connor is perhaps the best example of a Southern Gothic writer who relies on the grotesque in her work. In her influential essay “Some Aspects of the Grotesque in Southern Fiction” ( 1969 ), O’Connor challenged the reductive generalization of the grotesque as a term and stressed how grotesque literature pointed toward a particular kind of realism:

In these grotesque works … the writer has made alive some experience which we are not accustomed to observe every day, or which the ordinary man may never experience in his ordinary life. We find that connections which we would expect in the customary kind of realism have been ignored, that there are strange skips and gaps which anyone trying to describe manners and customs would certainly not have left. Yet the characters have an inner coherence, if not always a coherence to their social framework. Their fictional qualities lean away from typical social patterns, toward mystery and the unexpected … It’s not necessary to point out that the look of this fiction is going to be wild, that it is almost of necessity going to be violent and comic, because of the discrepancies that it seeks to combine. 26

Rather than a sensationalist freak or horror show, grotesque literature cuts through the veil of civility, through decorum and oppressive normative fabrications to expose a harsh, confusing reality of contradictions, violence, and aberrations.

Early Southern Gothic

Early examples of Southern Gothic effects or elements can be found in playwright William Bulloch Maxwell ( 1787–1814 ), poets Edward Coote Pinkney ( 1802–1828 ) and Richard Henry Wilde ( 1789–1847 ), and novelist John Pendleton Kennedy ( 1795–1870 ). Kennedy’s best-known novel, Swallow Barn ( 1835 ), often credited as a precursor of the plantation novel, features an overall Gothic landscape with a “Goblin Swamp” and a remote country house, which takes the place of the castles and mansions of the British Gothic. More overt Gothic elements are found in Kennedy’s third novel Rob of the Bowl ( 1838 ), where a supposedly haunted chapel terrifies the locals with its nightly groans and rumbles.

The Southern Gothic finds more solid form in the works of William Gilmore Simms ( 1806–1870 ). Perhaps best known for his frontier-based adventure novels such as The Yemassee ( 1835 ) influenced by Sir Walter Scott, several of Simms’s poems and novels rely on supernatural elements in his adaptation of Gothicism to specific southern locales. The aggressive title character of Martin Faber ( 1833 ) is a perverse Byronic figure, who confesses to murdering the innocent maiden Emily so he can marry the affluent Constance. Castle Dismal ( 1844 ) is a South Carolina ghost story that subverts traditional notions of marriage and domesticity—and features a narrator who spends a night in a haunted chamber of an old mansion. And Woodcraft ( 1854 ), the final of Simms’s Revolutionary War novels features devilish British villains, and in the Widow Eveleigh, Simms creates a more sophisticated version of the “persecuted maidens and wives in European Gothics.” 27

Edgar Allan Poe ( 1809–1849 ) became the first writer to fully explore the potential of the Southern Gothic. Many of Poe’s best-known poems and short stories, while not placed in a recognizable southern setting, display all the elements that would come to characterize Southern Gothic: the decaying house (and the family within); men and women driven half-mad by unexplained anxieties; and transgressive racial and sexual subjects involving identity, incest, and necrophilia. It is hard to overestimate the influence of Poe and “The Fall of the House of Usher” ( 1839 ), considered by many “the Ur-text of the Southern Gothic.” 28 Featuring a decrepit mansion, characters sick in body and mind, a live burial in a cellar vault, and doppelgängers, the story is saturated by an “insufferable gloom,” 29 an overall Gothic mood that has led William Moss to declare that “on the ruins of the house of Usher, Poe lays the foundation of a Southern Gothic.” 30

In addition, Poe has been seen as a central figure of the Southern Gothic because of his treatment of race, what Eric Savoy calls his “profound meditation upon the cultural significance of ‘blackness’ in the white American mind.” 31 Christopher Walsh attributes “Poe’s value to the development of the Southern Gothic … to his ability to destabilize hierarchies of order and to critique the South’s prevailing mythology and narrative.” 32 An example of this is “The Black Cat” ( 1843 ), in which the narrator describes his plunge “into excess” when he is overcome by “the spirit of PERVERSENESS.” 33 The story draws on classic staples of the Gothic: a perverse and murderous tyrant using atrocious violence against helpless victims, a live burial and a decaying corpse “clotted with gore,” 34 as well as the ruins of a burned-down house. But beneath the macabre surface is a more profound examination of the particularly southern sentimentalization of the relationship between master and slave. 35

Discrediting the Southern Gothic

During the 20th century, the veneration for Poe increased steadily, and scholars recognized his indelible influence on the Southern Gothic. However, in his own time, most 19th-century literary scholars and critics did much to discredit Poe as well as the Gothic genre on a national level and to gloss over traces of the Gothic in works of canonical national writers like Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville. Consensus seemed to be that “Gothic was an inferior genre incapable of high seriousness and appealing only of readers of questionable tastes.” 36 Poe was initially exorcized from the national literary canon and relegated to the confines of the nation’s benighted “other”: the South. But scholars and critics of southern literature were not too impressed with the Gothic elements either. In fact, the term “Southern Gothic,” referring to a subgenre or school of writers, was initially coined in 1935 by novelist Ellen Glasgow, who used the term to criticize what she called “the inflamed rabble of impulses in the contemporary Southern novel.” 37 Erskine Caldwell, William Faulkner, and other New Southern writers, she asserted, displayed a disturbing tendency of “aimless violence” and “fantastic nightmares.” 38 In the same year, in an article titled “The Horrible South,” Gerald Johnson claimed that T. S. Stribling, Thomas Wolfe, William Faulkner, and Erskine Caldwell had established “a certain reputation for Southern writing.” He labeled them “the merchants of death, hell and the grave … the horror-mongers in chief.” 39 Likewise, in New Republic ’s 1952 review of Flannery O’Connor’s Wise Blood , Isaac Rosenfeld complained about the author’s focus on degeneracy in “an insane world, peopled by monsters and submen.” 40 Attitudes like this made Tennessee Williams scoff at the “disparaging critics … some of the most eminent book critics” as well as “publishers, distributors, not to mention the reading public” whose “major line of attack” is that the Southern Gothic is “ dreadful .” 41 Indeed, many writers of pulp fiction have relied heavily on the clichéd conception of the South as violent, backwards, and degenerate—and found a large number of readers in the process. But proletarian (and Gothic) writers like Erskine Caldwell and Carson McCullers, whose literary qualities are no longer deemed spurious, were often marginalized by the Agrarians. In the 1930s, the accepted view of poor whites was that they “did not exist; or, if they did, they existed outside of ‘civilization.’ They were irredeemably ‘other,’ marking the outer limits of the culture.” For many of the Agrarians, Richard Gray notes, “to write of the ‘unknown people’ of the Southern countryside was not to write as a Southerner; it was doubtful if it was even to write as an American.” 42 It was not only white writers who were excluded from the canon. Michael Kreyling notes how the Agrarians and their “disciples in the 1940s and 1950s” obstructed “the inclusion of black writers,” like Richard Wright. 43

Despite Poe’s status as a foundational figure in Southern Gothic, William Faulkner is widely considered the most important and influential writer working in the vein of the Southern Gothic.

Faulkner’s dense and complex fictional Yoknapatawpha County was home to the bitter Civil War defeat and the following social, racial, and economic ruptures in the lives of its people. These transformations, and the resulting anxieties felt by Chickasaw Indians, poor whites and blacks, and aristocratic families alike, mark Faulkner’s work as deeply Gothic. In fact, his oft-quoted line, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past,” 44 which has come to serve as a clichéd definition of Faulkner’s works, is also a definition of the Gothic. The clash between Old South and New South takes on a Gothic hue in which the suppressed sins of slavery, patriarchy, and class strife bubble to the surface in uncanny ways. And all this takes place in a landscape of swamps, deep woods, and decaying plantations. Add to this the complex, modernist, labyrinthine language of Faulkner’s works, which create in readers a similarly Gothic sense of uncertainty and alienation, an impression that, as Fred Botting says, “there is no exit from the darkly illuminating labyrinth of language.” 45

Much of Faulkner’s work, novels as well as short stories, belongs in the Southern Gothic category. The often anthologized “A Rose for Emily” ( 1930 ) is perhaps the clearest example of Faulkner’s southern Gothicism. The story, narrated from a plural point of view by inhabitants of the small town, tells of the spinster Emily Grierson, who after her father’s death scandalizes the community when she takes up with the northern carpetbagger Homer Barron. When Homer disappears shortly after Emily has purchased arsenic, rumors abound in town. Decades later, after living a reclusive life, Emily dies. When the townspeople break open the door to an upstairs room, they discover a man’s “fleshless” corpse on the bed, the remains of him “rotted beneath what was left of the nightshirt.” 46 Next to the corpse is a pillow, with “the indentation of a head” and “a long strand of iron-gray hair.” 47 The story’s themes of necrophilia, sin, and secrecy mark it as obviously Gothic, yet Richard Gray argues that it also “offers an unerring insight into repression and the revenge of the repressed.” Emily’s actions should be seen as “a perverse reaction to the pressures of a stiflingly patriarchal society,” the way she has been “reduced, by the gaze of her neighbours and the narrative, to object status, a figure to patronise and pity … The extremity of her actions is,” he argues, “ultimately, a measure of the extremity of her condition, the degree of her imprisonment.” 48

Other examples of Faulkner’s southern Gothicism can be found in many of his greatest novels. The Sound and the Fury ( 1929 ) traces the downfall of the Compson family, one of Faulkner’s many “failed dynasties of the old ascendancy … all unwitting builders of haunted houses.” 49 The novel’s first three sections are narrated by the three Compson sons—the mentally handicapped Benjy, the brooding Quentin, and the malicious and patriarchal Jason—while the fourth and final section has the black maid Dilsey as the central character. This makes for a fragmented and unreliable story in the center of which is the Compson daughter, Caddy—the obsession of all three brothers, “both victim and perpetrator … [a] Gothic heroine” who “escapes her haunted mansion at a terrible price.” 50 Quentin is haunted and obsessed with his failure to protect his sister’s virginity. His oppressive sense of guilt eventually drives him to suicide. As I Lay Dying ( 1930 ) features variations of the vengeful spirit and live burial themes as well as emotionally unstable characters, all supported by an overall sense of confusion and fragmentation brought on by the rapidly shifting narrators. Sanctuary ( 1931 ), Faulkner’s most sensational and scandalous novel, features a controversial rape scene where the debutante Temple Drake is penetrated with a corncob by the sadistic and impotent villain Popeye. Though initially scorned by critics, Sanctuary has more recently been re-examined in light of its mirror structure and also “revalued as symbolic of the rape of southern womanhood by outside forces.” 51 Light in August ( 1932 ) has been read as “an exemplary of the traditional gothic tale of mystery, horror, and violence in America.” 52 It is a novel fueled by a sense of alienation and otherness, and features marginalized characters attempting but failing to make human connections. Joe Christmas, a black man passing as white, is accused of sleeping with and murdering a white woman. After escaping from jail, he is castrated and killed. The novel’s Gothicism is significantly southern in its exploration of religious zeal, sex, and racism, including violent lynchings and the pervasive fear of miscegenation.

Many critics and scholars seem to agree that Absalom, Absalom! ( 1936 ) is “one of the great Southern Gothic novels” and, according to Richard Gray, Faulkner’s “greatest and most seamlessly gothic narrative.” 53 Several scholars have noted the influence of Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher.” At Harvard, Quentin Compson tries to explain the South to his Canadian roommate, Shreve. He relies on stories told to him, by people who were told by someone else, most circling around the powerful figure of Thomas Sutpen, “ a demon, a villain .” 54 The resulting story becomes an “interpretive act of the imagination,” and the various chroniclers “exaggerate fact into myth and transform history into legend.” 55 Thomas Sutpen emerges as an elusive but tragic figure. As a poor boy he was turned away at the door of a plantation house by a black servant. This made him vow never to be put in that position again. He is determined to build his own plantation, complete with land, slaves, a family, and the hope of a male heir. This is Sutpen’s design, and Absalom, Absalom! patches together his ruthless determination to fulfill it. From Sutpen’s rejection of his mixed race wife and son in the West Indies to his creation of Sutpen’s Hundred and his calculating marriage to Ellen Coldfield, to the return of his rejected son, and the eventual tragedy, the novel is a complex web of race, gender, pride, shame, sin, and the repressive burdens of the past.

Southern Gothic after Faulkner

Even though Eudora Welty ( 1909–2001 ) herself rejected being labeled a Gothic writer, she is nevertheless considered a transitional figure in the Southern Gothic from Faulkner to more contemporary writers. Some scholars, such as Ruth D. Weston, have argued that Welty should not be placed in the Southern Gothic category. In her study Gothic Traditions and Narrative Techniques in the Fiction of Eudora Welty ( 1994 ), Weston distinguishes between the traditional (English) “upper case” Gothic, which she characterizes as “‘escape’ fiction,” and then a “core of gothic (lower case) materials—plots, settings, characters, image patterns, and vocabulary.” 56 It is this latter patchwork that Welty draws on, according to Weston. She claims that Welty’s “earliest and most basic use of gothic convention is in her landscapes,” 57 especially the history-haunted Natchez Trace, which is an ideal setting for Gothic themes of enclosure and escape. More recently, however, scholars have challenged Weston’s reluctance to place Welty firmly in the Southern Gothic tradition and have relied on feminist theory to elucidate how Welty employed Gothic settings and characters to stress the ways in which mythic southern narratives have silenced and repressed Others. In A Curtain of Green ( 1941 ), Susan V. Donaldson argues, Welty writes forth “a full-fledged carnival of gothic and grotesque heroines running amok, resistant to placement in traditional plots and roles.” 58

Where Eudora Welty did much to distance herself from being called a Gothic writer, Flannery O’Connor ( 1925–1964 ) is perhaps the best-known practitioner of the Southern Grotesque. Her many stories and her two novels are packed with an abundance of Gothic motifs, summarized by Chad Rohman as “monstrous misfits, devils and demonic figures, perpetrators and victims, doubles and doppelgängers , freaks and the deformed, madness and mad acts, ghosts and kindly spirits, and physical and spiritual isolation.” 59 Marked by “an aesthetic of extremes” 60 characteristic of the grotesque, O’Connor’s world is infused with a sense of “mystery and the unexpected,” as she notes in her essay on the grotesque. 61 Grounded in her Catholic faith, her view of life as “essentially mysterious” results in her belief that in order to capture that life as realistically as possible, her fiction is necessarily “going to be wild … violent and comic, because of the discrepancies it seeks to combine.” 62

Good examples of both the Gothic and grotesque features of O’Connor’s work are found in two of her most canonized short stories. In “Good Country People” ( 1955 ), the nihilistic and pseudo-intellectual Hulga still lives at home at the age of thirty-two. She has a “weak heart,” a wooden leg, and a doctoral degree in philosophy. When a “sincere and genuine” nineteen-year-old Bible salesman turns up at the house, Hulga decides to demonstrate her superiority by seducing him. But he turns out to be a conman who seduces her, only to steal her wooden leg and leave her stranded in a barn loft. “You ain’t so smart,” he tells her before leaving, “I been believing in nothing ever since I was born!” 63 And in “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” ( 1955 ), a family road trip takes a shocking, violent turn when the characters come upon the escaped convict The Misfit. When the grandmother announces his identity, The Misfit orders the family killed. After killing the grandmother himself, he observes that, “She would of been a good woman … if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life.” 64 Both stories feature shocking endings meant to jar readers. As O’Connor noted of her own writing, to make stories work, “what is needed is an action that is totally unexpected, yet totally believable, and … for me, this is always an action which indicates that grace has been offered. And frequently it is an action in which the devil has been the unwilling instrument of grace.” 65 It is in the climax of her stories and novels that the characters—and readers—get a brief glimpse of the mystery O’Connor alludes to, of the possibility of redemption or salvation. But as the stories show, redemption often comes at a terrible price. Hulga is stripped of her superciliousness and forced to face reality by a larcenous Bible salesman, but one who is described with Christ-like imagery on the last page: a “blue figure struggling successfully over the green speckled lake.” 66 In a more extreme version, the grandmother in “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” is also a character who sees herself as morally superior. Yet faced with annihilation, she tells her killer, “Why you’re one of my babies. You’re one of my own children!” 67

O’Connor’s two novels are both explorations of religious fundamentalism in the Deep South. In Wise Blood ( 1952 ), World War II veteran Hazel Motes returns to his Tennessee home to find it decaying and decrepit. Having lost his faith during the war, he takes to the city of Taulkinham, intent on spreading his atheist doctrine in his Church Without Christ. Yet he feels haunted by Christ and by gothic nightmares of being buried alive. Spiraling ever downwards, Motes ends up killing his competitor and doppelganger Solace Layfield, before a final act of self-degradation—and possible salvation—in which he blinds himself, puts shards of glass in his shoes, and wraps barbed wire around his torso. The Violent Bear It Away ( 1960 ) is a dark tale of fourteen-year-old Francis Tarwater, who has been raised to be a prophet by his great-uncle, the self-declared backwoods prophet Mason Tarwater. When Mason dies, Francis moves to the city to find his secular uncle Rayber and his mentally deficient son Bishop. Francis was brought up believing his mission was to baptize Bishop. In the ensuing struggle, O’Connor exposes both religious fundamentalism and a world based on supercilious facts as inherently faulty.

Like O’Connor, the stories and novels of Carson McCullers (born Lula Carson Smith , 1917–1967 ) are steeped in the grotesque. An abundance of “freaks” fill the pages: dwarfs, giants, cross-dressers, homosexuals, and deaf-mutes. In The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter ( 1940 ), the life of adolescent tomboy Mick clashes with the deaf-mute John Singer, an isolated and alienated misfit, whom the other characters nonetheless confide in, perhaps—as Melissa Free notes—because “he recognizes and affirms their own differences, which they feel but cannot name as queer.” 68 Much like McCullers herself, Mick rejects established gender roles, and her rejection makes her an outsider in the small, isolated Georgia town and propels the narrative toward themes of sex, gender fluidity, and alienation. The Ballad of the Sad Café ( 1951 ), also set in an isolated Georgia community, features the hunchback Lymon, who shows up on Miss Amelia’s doorstep, claiming to be her cousin. Amid the community’s increasing rumors of scandal, Miss Amelia settles down with Lymon and opens a café. But the return of her ex-husband brings violence and eventual isolation and alienation. Both novels are also grotesque in the way the so-called outsiders demand readers’ sympathy, and McCullers points to the failures at the heart of the society that seeks to repress its Others. This is also the case in McCullers’ other novels, such as The Member of the Wedding ( 1946 ) and Clock Without Hands ( 1961 ).

American theater of the 1940s and 1950s was infused with a heavy dose of Southern Gothic sensibility thanks to the plays of Tennessee Williams ( 1911–1983 ). Characters with varying degrees of illness populate his works, and his own sexual orientation, socially unacceptable at the time, found its way into plays such as Cat on a Hot Tin Roof ( 1955 ), in which Brick, who is gay, struggles with his unhappy marriage and with his dying but domineering father, Big Daddy. In other plays, such as The Glass Menagerie ( 1944 ), A Streetcar Named Desire ( 1947 ), and Sweet Bird of Youth ( 1959 ), Williams created Gothic spaces of boundary crossings as well as other familiar tropes of the Southern Gothic, such as disintegrating southern families, alienation, loneliness, alcoholism, and physical and psychological violence. Rather than a mere freakshow, Williams uses the characters in his plays to question the notion of normalcy and to explore the discrepancies between private and public selves. His plays, as Stephen Matterson argues, point to the performative aspects of all our lives, but perhaps especially those lived in the South, a region that in Williams’s plays is presented as an incongruous site of Romantic myth and urban, modern reality. 69 The struggle of his characters to come to terms with the discrepancy comes off as essentially heroic, embodied best, perhaps, in Blanche DuBois from A Streetcar Named Desire ( 1947 ): the southern belle trapped in the modern world.

While he worked in many genres, Truman Capote ( 1924–1984 ) is often placed in the school of Southern Gothic writers. Other Voices, Other Rooms ( 1948 ) relies on obvious elements of Southern Gothic, from its secluded, decaying mansion at Skull’s Landing to scenes of pedophilia and violence, as well as characters drawn from the grotesque vein of Southern Gothic: a crossdresser, a mute quadriplegic, and a dwarf. Capote’s childhood friend Harper Lee ( 1926–2016 ) wrote perhaps the most widely read and most-loved Southern Gothic of the 20th century. The Pulitzer Prize-winning To Kill a Mockingbird ( 1960 ) is told by the tomboy Scout and draws on Gothic traits to examine boundaries of race, class, and gender in the 1930s South. Gothic elements include the children’s fear of the mysterious neighbor Boo Radley, as well as a rabid dog, and a Halloween night in which fear of the supernatural pales in the face of the violent, alcoholic, and racist Bob Ewell, who attacks Scout and her brother Jem with a knife.

Southern Gothic and African Americans

African Americans have long had their own unique perspective on Southern Gothic and the repressed racial tensions at the heart of the genre. In Playing in the Dark ( 1992 ), Toni Morrison examines the ways in which early white writers of the American Gothic used the black slave body as a site onto which was projected the various shortcomings, failures, and repressed desires of the white American psyche. This resulted in the construction of what Morrison calls “an American Africanism—a fabricated brew of darkness, otherness, alarm, and desire that is uniquely American.” 70 In other words, blacks became monstrous Others who haunted the Southern Gothic and American culture at large. It is this otherness that African American writers have challenged. Richard Wright eerily sums up the very real Gothic aura of the African American experience in 12 Million Black Voices ( 1941 ): “We black men and women in America today, as we look back upon scenes of rapine, sacrifice, and death, seem to be children of a devilish aberration, descendants of an interval of nightmare in history, fledglings of a period of amnesia on the part of men who once dreamed a great dream and forgot.” 71 Certainly, if Southern Gothic, as Maisha Wester contends, “can be understood as a genre that is aware of the impossibility of escaping racial haunting,” 72 then slave narratives, such as Charles Ball’s Fifty Years in Chains ( 1859 ), William Craft’s Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom ( 1860 ), and Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl ( 1861 ) in essence initiated a unique and often overlooked African American variation on the Southern Gothic.

Modern African American writers also adopted the Gothic conventions, in the process exchanging the genre’s more supernatural aspects with more realistic features “founded on actual lives often lived in the Gothic manner, that is indeed terrifying.” 73 The starkest example of this is Richard Wright, whose texts confront the horrors of white racism head-on with an unflinching eye. Wright’s work marks a reversal of Gothic tropes, one in which whiteness takes on uncanny and horrific hues. In his essay “The Ethics of Living Jim Crow,” Wright describes lying in bed as a young boy, delirious, and fearful of the “monstrous white faces … leering” at him above his bed. 74

The notion of “double consciousness” presented by W. E. B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk ( 1903 ) runs through much of African American Gothic. An early example of this is Jean Toomer’s Cane ( 1923 ), in which the theme of miscegenation and the figure of the mulatto take on Gothic hues. Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man ( 1952 ) opens with a nod to both Du Bois and the Gothic: “I am an invisible man. No, I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allan Poe … When [people] approach me they see only my surroundings, themselves, or figments of their imagination—indeed, everything and anything except me.” 75 The novel moves from the small-town South to New York, but in each location the horrors and monsters inherent in the Gothic turn out to be too real and too human for the novel’s black protagonist, who feels increasingly entrapped and imprisoned. Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God ( 1937 ) stays on southern ground, in Florida, and is ripe with Gothic scenes and imagery: Janie, the protagonist, is forced to shoot and kill her rabies-infected husband after he tries to shoot her. And the hurricane that sweeps over the Everglades and turns Lake Okeechobee into a “monstropolous beast” 76 is a recurrent Gothic trope. The African American version of (Southern) Gothic has found its zenith in Toni Morrison. While not a southerner, Morrison still employs Southern Gothic in her seminal novel Beloved ( 1987 ), a text that takes place mostly in Ohio but is haunted by traumatic events that occurred in the South. Beloved is a novel ripe for “sophisticated psychoanalytical and postmodernist or poststructuralist readings which focus on the treatment of fragmented subjectivities and how language strains to record (and is perhaps incapable) of documenting the horrors at the heart of the [Gothic] novel.” 77 Continuing in the vein of Morrison, in A Visitation of Spirits ( 1989 ) Randall Kenan’s strategy is to treat as uncanny not the ghosts from the past and all the repressed markers of racism and slavery that they bring to the surface but rather the white institutions that constructed blacks as others. 78

Contemporary Southern Gothic

Cormac McCarthy is arguably the most critically acclaimed contemporary practitioner of the Southern Gothic. McCarthy began his literary career with four dark and deeply violent novels set in Appalachian Tennessee: The Orchard Keeper ( 1965 ), Outer Dark ( 1968 ), Child of God ( 1973 ), and Suttree ( 1979 ). All four novels owe a debt to the tradition of the Southern Gothic especially that of William Faulkner and Flannery O’Connor. But Robert Brinkmeyer also sees McCarthy’s “gothic imagination” as “haunted by a frightening vision of destruction and waste” that is “simultaneously pre- and post-human.” 79 At the same time, as Lydia Cooper asserts, McCarthy’s “horror-drenched and heavily allegorical aesthetic style” is combined “with historically rooted commentary on social ills, such as issues of race, class, urbanization, and industrialization, to bring into focus repressed social anxieties.” 80 Child of God shows perhaps the strongest influence of O’Connor’s grotesque take on the Southern Gothic. The necrophiliac mass-murderer Lester Ballard is “an extreme contemporary rendering of the gothic villain.” 81 The story follows Ballard’s exiled subterranean existence and his downward spiral into murderer and necrophiliac and finally to a primal, animal-like state. McCarthy’s initial description of Ballard as “a child of God much like yourself perhaps” 82 invites an unnerving sense of identification with this “reduced, grotesque, and monstrous aberration of humanity.” 83

After decades of western-themed novels, McCarthy returned to the Southern Gothic with The Road ( 2006 ). The Pulitzer Prize-winning novel is a post-apocalyptic story set in an unspecified southern location. A father and his son traverse a barren wasteland of corpses and marauding bands of cannibals to reach the ocean. Both shockingly violent and contemplative, Jay Ellis reads The Road as “haunted both by Old Southern slavery guilt, and by anxiety over New Southern consumption.” 84

Cormac McCarthy has been linked to a so-called Rough South tradition, also referred to as “Grit Lit.” The writers placed under these headings all borrow various elements of Southern Gothic to support their bleak portrayals of the American South in which violence plays a crucial part. While the group of writers is predominantly white and male, a few women like Dorothy Allison have also been placed in the Rough South category. Allison’s Bastard out of Carolina ( 1992 ) certainly draws on Gothic elements to expose the ways in which patriarchy has repressed women’s voices that challenged the mythic southern narrative. In many of the stories and novels by male Rough South writers, such as Barry Hannah, Larry Brown, William Gay, Tom Franklin, and Ron Rash, the antagonists are violent men of seemingly pure evil, men driven by incredible bloodthirst who will stop at nothing to satisfy their deadly desires. Invoking the Gothic tradition, these villains may take on the shape of ghosts, witches, or living dead, as in Gay’s The Long Home ( 1999 ) or Rash’s One Foot in Eden ( 2002 ), but apart from the obvious sensationalism provided by these killers, the writers use the villains symbolically in order to point out inherent problems in today’s (post-)South. Hannah’s Yonder Stands Your Orphan ( 2001 ) takes place in the contemporary Mississippi Delta, which is depicted as a rotten and degenerate place, a landscape in physical and moral decay, where casino musicians, “although mistaken for the living by their audiences, were actually dead. Ghouls howling for egress from their tombs,” 85 and where zombies wait behind the counters of the countless pawnshops, “quite obviously dead and led by someone beyond.” 86 In this rotten South, the land is also a catalogue of past horrors. The Confederate and Union dead resting in the ground have been joined by other victims of horrible crimes:

Scores of corpses rested below the lakes, oxbows, river ways and bayous of these parts, not counting the skeletons of Grant’s infantry. The country was built to hide those dead by foul deed, it sucked at them. Back to the flood of 1927 , lynchings, gun and knife duels were common stories here. Muddy water made a fine lost tomb. 87

The resurfacing of two dead bodies buried in the bayou unleashes a violent rampage perpetrated by the novel’s villain. In true Gothic fashion, the return of the repressed past brings forth guilt, responsibility, and a grotesque display of violence. 88

Hannah’s zombies are part of a larger tradition in Southern Gothic. As the editors of Undead Souths point out, the South has been—and continues to be—home to a “pervading presence of diverse forms of undeadness—racial, ethnic, political, economic, historical.” 89 Using Robert Kirkman’s comic book series The Walking Dead ( 2003 –) as an endpoint, Jay Ellis traces the “zombie narrative” of southern culture from its beginnings in 1929 and sees it as “a reemergent memory of slavery” and an “expression of wider xenophobic fears of the other” as well as an expression of gender fears. 90 But he also points to zombies as “global citizens,” made southern by way of Haiti, of slavery and Jim Crow laws, 91 thereby making the zombie a prominent figure in New Southern studies.

The Southern Gothic remains undead, its territory broader and more inclusive than ever before. While few southern writers are content to work solely in the Southern Gothic vein, many nonetheless tap into the sharp divisions that make up their region, the beautiful pastoral Arcadia and the grotesque deformities that rise to the surface both literally and figuratively. The attempt to come to terms with this chasm—or to expose its cracks and fissures—remains a potent and relevant vehicle driving a substantial body of southern literature today.

Discussion of the Literature

Scholarship on the Southern Gothic has seen a dramatic rise in the 21st century, both in volume, scope, and acceptance. Yet there is still a sparsity of monographs covering the full spectrum of Southern Gothic. Instead, various chapters and articles about specific writers of Southern Gothic are spread out over monographs and anthologies dedicated to American literature, Gothic literature, American Gothic literature, Southern literature, or specific southern writers. Therefore, the history of Southern Gothic scholarship begins with more general works and slowly becomes more specific.

Leslie Fiedler is widely recognized as “the first critic to discuss the American gothic’s peculiarity and to recognize its social impulse.” 92 He did so in his influential Love and Death in the American Novel ( 1960 ), where he acknowledged that the Gothic has “continued to seem vulgar and contrived” but argues that “it is the gothic form that has been most fruitful in the hands of our best writers.” 93 American fiction, he insists, is “a gothic fiction … a literature of darkness and the grotesque in a land of light and affirmation.” 94 Among the southern writers discussed at length by Fiedler are Simms, Poe, and Faulkner, and Fiedler ends his study by pointing to Elizabeth Spencer, Flannery O’Connor, and “such talented female fictionists as Katherine Anne Porter, Eudora Welty, and Carson McCullers” as writers who expand Faulkner’s “vision of the South as a world of gothic terror disguised as historical fact” into a “living tradition.” 95 While Fiedler paved the way for a scholarly interest in the Gothic, that interest was made possible by a “renewed interest in psychoanalysis and Marxism, theoretical modes that have since been used extensively and effectively in interpretations of the Gothic in many forms.” 96 Thus, Irving Malin’s New American Gothic ( 1962 ) examined contemporary writers, including such central figures of the Southern Gothic as Flannery O’Connor, Truman Capote, and Carson McCullers.

The renewed academic interest in the American Gothic spilled over into southern studies and led to monographs focusing on Gothic elements in specific southern writers. But scholars still struggled with the legitimacy of the genre. So while G. R. Thompson in Poe’s Fiction: Romantic Irony in the Gothic Tales ( 1973 ) sets out to rehabilitate Poe “by equally New Critical and History of Ideas standards,” ultimately, he asserts, “the Gothic is a set of devalued ingredients, not really essential to American writing at Poe’s time.” 97 And Elizabeth M. Kerr, who relies heavily on Fiedler’s work in her William Faulkner’s Gothic Domain ( 1979 ), begins her study by almost apologizing for writing on a topic “scorned by critics as subliterary, sentimental ‘formula’ fiction” that has “pejorative connotations.” 98 However, concurrently with literature’s turn toward postmodernism and, increasingly, poststructuralism, Southern Gothic became increasingly fertile ground for scholars imbued with theoretical tools from Julia Kristeva, Jacques Lacan, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Judith Butler, and others. Patricia Yaeger’s Dirt and Desire: Reconstructing Southern Women’s Writing, 1930–1990 ( 2000 ) is a prime example of this new movement, as is Tara McPherson’s Reconstructing Dixie: Race, Gender, and Nostalgia in the Imagined South ( 2003 ). Both monographs, while not specific studies of the Southern Gothic, nevertheless focus on the instability of some of the central categories that have been used to build narratives and counter-narratives of the South: race and gender. And they draw on postmodern and poststructuralist theory to revisit and, indeed, reconstruct given assumptions about the South and canonical works of southern literature.

Fiedler pointed to the link between the Gothic and America’s troubled racial history, and in The Heroic Ideal in American Literature ( 1971 ), Theodore L. Gross argued that modern African American writers used elements of Southern Gothic in more realistic ways to point to the horrors of racism. Maisha L. Wester and other 21st-century scholars have examined slave narratives as the inception of African American Gothic and shown how, to late 20th-century African American writers, the Gothic is “a tool capable of expressing the complexity of black experience in America.” 99 Wester is but one of many contemporary scholars who are re-examining and re-evaluating aspects of Southern Gothic in canonical writers, but also drastically expanding the canon in ways that correlate with the so-called New Southern studies. Houston Baker and Dana Nelson defined New Southern studies as a school that “welcomes the complication of old borders and terrains, wishes to construct and survey a new scholarly map of ‘The South.’” 100 As the title of the anthology Look Away: The US South in New World Studies suggests, the editors envision a “liminal south, one that troubles essentialist narratives both of global-southern decline and of global-northern national or regional unity, of American or Southern exceptionalism.” 101

Scholars working in this vein have embraced a postcolonial and transnational approach in the rethinking of the South and its literature. In fact, the 21st century has been a tumultuous era of change and re-examination within southern studies. Traditional and monolithic themes such as race, place, and past are being re-examined, challenged, revised, and injected with newer approaches and topics such as trauma theory and queer studies. This has opened up previously overlooked, repressed, and neglected spaces, peoples, and subjects, so that today, scholars are exploring the presence or absence of Southern Gothic’s relation to indigenous groups, queers, the Caribbean and Latin America, and vampires, to name a few. Southern Gothic Literature ( 2013 ), edited by Jay Ellis, includes a chapter on “Southern Gothic poetry,” a genre much overlooked in traditional studies of the Southern Gothic. But where Ellis’s anthology focuses on well-established writers, Toni Morrison being the newest, a good example of the sprawling richness of current scholarship in the Southern Gothic is presented in the anthology Undead Souths: The Gothic and Beyond in Southern Literature and Culture ( 2015 ). Among the many topics covered are “Haitian zombie mythology in Herman Melville’s depiction of chattel and wage slaveries” as well as “diasporic transplantations in the surreal fiction of the Irish-born, Trinidadian author Shani Mootoo.” 102 As these examples make clear, and as the editors of Undead Souths note, the most recent scholarship on the Southern Gothic is a far cry from “the now-threadbare tropes of ‘ the Southern Gothic’—singular and capitalized—as if both the region (‘Southern’) and the genre (‘Gothic’) are readily identifiable, monolithic entities.” 103 And judging from the recent outpour of scholarship and academic conferences dedicated to the Southern Gothic, the discussion about this particular genre does not seem to be waning anytime soon.

Gothic Literature : the Characteristics of Gothic Fiction

This essay about the enduring influence and characteristics of Gothic prose, exploring its themes of dread, obscurity, and the paranormal. It examines the genre’s distinct settings, brooding ambiance, supernatural elements, and intricate characters, illustrating how Gothic literature delves into the darker aspects of human nature and our fascination with the eerie. Through examples from notable works like “Rebecca,” “The Fall of the House of Usher,” “The Turn of the Screw,” and “Wuthering Heights,” the essay underscores the genre’s enduring relevance in captivating readers with tales that blur the lines between reality and the supernatural.

How it works

Gothic prose, originating in the midst of the 18th century, persists as among the most enduring and adaptable literary categories in Western culture, exerting influence over literature, cinema, and art up to the present. Anchored in an intrigue with medievalism, the paranormal, and the enigmatic, Gothic narratives are renowned for their distinctive fusion of dread and amour, probing into human cognition through motifs of dread, obscurity, and the unexplainable. Gothic literature’s traits encompass distinct locales, ambiance and mood, otherworldly components, and intricate personages, all serving to evoke the reader’s profound anxieties and challenge the demarcations between reality and the paranormal.

Among the most conspicuous attributes of Gothic prose is its setting. Gothic narratives frequently unfold in desolate, distant settings that parallel the somber themes and lugubrious narratives that propel the storyline. Antediluvian fortresses, dilapidated manors, secluded hamlets, and ominous woodlands abound. These settings transcend mere stage settings for the unfolding events; they are integral to the ambiance and often mirror the inner turmoil of the characters or function as a metaphor for degeneration and descent. As exemplified by the decrepit manor of Manderley in Daphne du Maurier’s “Rebecca,” symbolizing the decay of antiquated aristocratic customs and the haunting legacy of the past on the present.

Ambiance and mood are equally pivotal in Gothic prose, often characterized as brooding, lugubrious, and taut. This ambiance is meticulously crafted through elaborate portrayals of setting, weather, and milieu, fostering a sense of apprehension and impending disaster. The utilization of gloomy, vivid imagery serves to construct a backdrop conducive to tales of terror and anguish. An archetypal instance can be discerned in Edgar Allan Poe’s oeuvre, such as “The Fall of the House of Usher,” where the atmosphere is palpably tense and ominous, mirroring the psychological intricacy and instability of its characters.

Supernatural components constitute another hallmark of Gothic prose. These may encompass specters, fiends, accursed individuals, and other fantastical entities. Frequently, these supernatural elements are deployed to delve into motifs of madness, existential dread, and the human psyche. However, what sets many Gothic tales apart is the ambiguity surrounding whether these elements are truly supernatural or figments of a character’s tormented psyche. This ambiguity is a central feature in Henry James’ “The Turn of the Screw,” where the authentic nature of the phantoms remains nebulous, blurring the delineations between the paranormal and the psychological.

The personages in Gothic prose are intricate and often tormented by past transgressions or calamities, fueling the psychological tension in the narrative. Gothic protagonists are typically flawed, plagued by secrets, or burdened by remorse. Heroines, conversely, frequently find themselves in jeopardy, confronting mysterious or supernatural forces. These personages transcend mere victims or malefactors; they are profoundly developed, with their anxieties and aspirations frequently propelling the narrative forward. Emily Brontë’s “Wuthering Heights” furnishes a vivid illustration of Gothic characters with its portrayal of the tormented Heathcliff and the tragic figure of Catherine Earnshaw, whose passionate, doomed liaison is punctuated by jealousy, retribution, and reclamation.

To conclude, Gothic prose offers a profound exploration of the somber facets of human nature and our captivation with the eerie. Through its ominous settings, mood-infused narratives, otherworldly elements, and intricate personages, the genre probes into the abysses of terror, fixation, and the paranormal. These facets converge to ensure that Gothic prose endures in captivating and terrifying readers, underscoring that our deepest apprehensions do not solely stem from the phantasms lurking in the shadows, but from what lurks within ourselves. This genre remains profoundly pertinent as it delves into motifs that are universally human: dread, demise, the enigmatic, and the supernatural, all interwoven into tales that are as gripping today as they were upon their inception.

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Definition of Gothic Literature
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A Brief Introduction to Gothic Literature

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William Faulkner

From the Gothic to American Gothic to Southern Gothic

The Southern Grotesque

Early Southern Gothic

Discrediting the Southern Gothic

Southern Gothic after Faulkner

Southern Gothic and African Americans

Contemporary Southern Gothic

Discussion of the Literature

Further Reading

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Gothic Literature : the Characteristics of Gothic Fiction

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