‘Brief Notes’ was the leaflet sent out by the Society when people asked for more clarity on the Gothic genre.
THE CORPUS
Horace Walpole is generally credited with having begun the Gothic crate with his Castle of Otranto, published in 1765. This story is set in the never-never land of the Middle Ages and contains all the soon-to-be-familiar features of the genre, to wit: fainting maidens, dastardly villains, rotting castles, ancient curses, confusions about the blood line, brigands and banditti, and bags of atmosphere and heightened diction.
Even at the beginning, then, the Gothic genre was one of extremes, a world of stark dichotomies: black against white, strength against weakness, virtue against wickedness, male against female. It was both horrible tragedy and rip-roaring comedy, the latter frequently totally inadvertent and occurring when the drama, overladen with its own portentousness, slipped and fell flat in a puddle of bathos. That contemporaries were well aware of the vulnerability of the genre to ridicule is perfectly exemplified by Jane Austen’s affectionate ridicule in Northanger Abbey, written towards the end of the eighteenth century.
The Castle of Otranto began a literary craze which was to run with extreme vigour for some forty or fifty years, reaching its peak in the 1780s and 90s with William Beckford’s Vathek (a mischievous, playful and thoroughly elegant piece), Matthew Gregory Lewis’s The Monk (semi-pornographic and highly entertaining), Godwin’s Caleb Williams (a saturnine, gloomy, and horrible tale of persecution), and Mrs Radcliffe’s masterpieces of the picturesque, in particular The Mysteries of Udolpho and The Italian.
The usual academic view is that after these triumphs the Gothic flame gradually burned itself out, though Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Maturin’s Melmoth The Wanderer are generally allowed to be a last superb efflorescence. Adherents of this system of classification state that the I820s saw the end of the Gothic genre per se, and that nothing beyond that can be included under the tattered and bloodÂstained banner of the school. But this has always seemed to aficionados an extremely narrow standpoint; after all, it is hardly likely that something which was so successful and all-pervading could simply have vanished down one of its own black dungeons and never emerged again into the light of day.
Clearly the Gothic novel as epitomised in the eighteenth century, with its posturing villains and its irritatingly vapid heroines, went out of fashion and probably has done so permanently despite the current revival of interest. This seems very little to be regretted. Melodrama was replaced by something far more subtle and intellectual, something with a far greater power to disturb. Psychological dramas were being written even before the eighteenth century closed – one thinks in particular of William Godwin’s masterpieces of claustrophobia – but in the nineteenth and twentieth century these dramas came to perfection, as writers again and again explored breakdown, madness, supernatural and human malice, the failure of all accepted shibboleths and laws, and the dubiousness of the concept that there is only one true objective reality.
By now the actors in the dramas had changed beyond recognition. But the Gothic atmosphere itself had never changed, and in fact was identifiable in works written long before Walpole’s day, for example in the Jacobean dramas of John Webster.
Likewise, such an atmosphere is easy to see in some of the writers, artists, and film-makers of our own century. The classic Gothic ambiance is one of black morbidity, claustrophobia, threat, instability and decay. Leaving aside the human or supernatural oppressors, the buildings, the countryside, even the empty air, all bring their own hideous sense of suffocation Reading these books, looking at these pictures or watching these films, we experience a cathartic sense of release as we relive consciously the archetypal nightmare of trying to run away and not being able to move, of being pursued by gloomy figures with an implacable thirst for vengeance, the common night-terrors known to everyone.
But the Gothic is not all nightmares. It is also black humour, graveyard or gallows humour, defiance, laughter, and capering in the face of death – the skeleton costume at the masked ball. Though the following list, on the whole, could not be described as being full of laughs, the general message in the end is usually one of hope, the triumph of brave spirits over almost unendurable adversity, or the final destruction and annihilation of some particular revolting villain.
The following pages are from a somewhat unbrilliant copy but it is the only one we have – if anyone has a better one, please share it.
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