Gothic

1. Gothic “The Fall of the House of Usher”

2. Origins • Type of prose fiction inaugurated by Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764)

3. Is the Gothic an inversion of Romanticism? • Romanticism/Transcendentalism • Associated with the outdoors and nature • Looks upward toward goodness, nature, air, sky • Being one with nature: human beings have a“God within” • Belief in innate goodness of humanity • Gothic • Associated with enclosed, man-made structures falling into decay • Looks beneath a surface reality to evil or turmoil beneath • Duality or doubleness; separation from nature • Negative emotional states and drives

4. Purposes To create terror To open fiction to the realm of the irrational—perverse impulses, nightmarish terrors, obsessions—lying beneath the surface of the civilized mind To demonstrate the presence of the uncanny existing in the world that we know rationally through experience.

5. Characteristics • An atmosphere of gloom, terror, or mystery. •  Elements of the uncanny (unheimlich) that challenge reality • Mysterious events that cause the protagonist to question the evidence of his or her senses • The presence of seemingly supernatural beings.

6. Characters and Actions Events, often violent or macabre, that cannot be hidden or rationalized despite the efforts of the narrator. Focus on death and the events surrounding death; the living may seem half-dead and the dead half-alive. Characters act from negative emotions: fear, revenge, despair, hatred, anger.

7. Characteristics • A disturbed or unnatural relation between the orders of things that are usually separate: • Life/death • Good/evil • Dream/reality • Rationality/madness • Light/dark

8. Characteristics A hidden or double reality beneath the surface of what at first appears to be a single narrative. As Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick explains, a primary feature of the Gothic is that the self is “massively blocked off from something to which it ought normally to have access” (12): air, life, knowledge, the rational self.

9. Setting • An exotic setting isolated in time or space from contemporary life, often a ruined mansion or castle. • The building • Associated with past violence • Hidden doors • Subterranean secret passages • Concealed staircases, and other such features.

10. Gothic Narrative Strategies Interrupted narrative form. Stories may use multiple starts, frame stories, interruptions of stories, letters or inserted texts, repetition, and omissions of relevant key details. Narrators may have partial knowledge from which they piece together an imperfect explanation of what cannot be rationally explained.

11. Gothic Narrative Strategies Fragmentary narration (letters, multiple narrators) Barrier between the surface reality and the turbulent reality beneath the surface. Doubleness (double characters, parallel chambers, mind divorced from body) where singleness should be. Exposure of what was once hidden. 

12. Sedgwick on the Gothic Something is going on inside the isolation (the present, the continuous consciousness, the dream, the sensation itself). Something intensely relevant is going on impossibly out of reach. Three main elements: what’s inside, what’s outside, and what separates them (barriers)

13. Barriers Often a physical barrier symbolizes a barrier to the information that provides a key to the truth or explanation of the events.  Sometimes the truth is revealed through an artifact that breaches the barrier between what is known and what is unknown

14. Examples • A document telling a family secret • A key that opens a secret room • An object or even a creature imprisoned behind the wall • What would this be in “The Tell-Tale Heart”? • What would it be in “The Fall of the House of Usher”?

15. Fuseli, “The Nightmare”

16. Poe

17. Thoughts? Questions? More on the Gothic and quotations from Sedgwick: http://public.wsu.edu/~campbelld/amlit/novel.htm 1928 Avant-Garde version of “The Fall of the House of Usher” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Aav1T9xqIIY