Gothic Literature

Gothic Literature

Introduction

Scary stories are indigenous to human artistry. Out of curiosity about the secrets of nature, human behavior, and unexplained bumps in the night, from early times people have investigated the mystic and aberrant and shared their findings about the unknown. When literary trends fled the high-toned, artificial sanctuary of the Age of Reason, the backlash against regularity and predictability sent literature far into the murky past to retrieve traditional folksay about intriguing mysteries. The most accessible model of imaginative narrative derived from the Middle Ages, a fertile period textured with contrasts—great productivity and abominable crimes, piety and religious barbarism, admirable soldiery and the doings of witches, scientific innovation and the dabblings of alchemists, royal ritual and the danse macabre, and bold architecture to suit church and civic needs. The period thrived on a grand cultural exchange as wandering rabbis visited distant enclaves of Judaism, traders imported the wonders of Asia, and Christian crusaders tramped the long road to Jerusalem. The writings generated from the period range from saint lore and “Salve, Regina” to Reynard the Fox fables, Chinese spirit tales, troubadour love plaints, and stories of shape-shifting. Like finely stitched tapestry, the strands of medievalism held firm, lending their color and decorative meanderings to the late 1700s, when traditional gothic literature made its formal debut (Lebedushkina, 2010).

As is often true with something new and different, analysis discloses familiar elements at the heart of originality. Thus, the 18th-century writings of Abbé Prévost, the graveyard poets, Tobias Smollett, and Horace Walpole presented oddments culled from Asian storytelling, Scheherazade's cyclic stories from The Arabian Nights, Charles Perrault's “Beauty and the Beast,” Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, and the bloody tragedies of the Renaissance stage. With scraps of picaresque literature, episodic adventure lore, and supernatural balladry, the gothic school returned to the wilderness and the architecture of the distant past for night sounds and shadows on which to anchor tales of terror. The critic Anna Laetitia Barbauld legitimized such nerve-tingling page-turners for their stimulus to the emotions and intellect. Buoyed by the example of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Friedrich von Schiller, and the German romantics, the English-speaking world created its own pulse-pumping narratives, beginning with William Beckford's Vathek, Sophia Lee's The Recess, Charlotte Smith's The Old Manor House, and the pace-setting The Mysteries of Udolpho by Ann Radcliffe, matriarch of the English gothic movement. (Rix, 2011)

The double dealing and tyranny of imperialism suit the secrecy and conspiracy that characterizes gothic literature. A pervasive genre in world literature, gothic stories convey some classic themes, such as that of the strong bullying the weak, as seen in Robert Louis Stevenson's writings of the Pacific, Nigerian author Amos Tutuola's The Palm-Wine Drinkard (1952) and My Life in the Bush of Ghosts (1954), Amy Tan's Chinese historical novel The Bonesetter's Daughter (2001), Isaac Bashevis Singer's prophecy of the Nazi empire in Der Sotn in Gorey (Satan in Goray, 1935), and the Japanese ghost stories translated by Lafcadio Hearn. Subtextual implications of barbarism, racism, miscegenation, insanity, and xenophobia dominate ...