Gothic Fiction

1. Gothic Fiction What is it anyway??

2. Why Gothic? • Goths • Invaders from Asia that destroyed the city of Rome in the 400s • Given land in Spain • Term “Gothic” came to mean barbaric or rude • 12th century medieval France • Became a form of architecture used to build cathedrals • Name sticks because the style was so different, extreme, and “barbaric”

3. Gothic Cathedrals

5. Barcelona, Spain

6. Stained Glass

7. Gothic Cathedrals • Tall • Reach to God • Floor plan in shape of a cross • Thinner walls • More windows to let in light • Buttresses used to keep walls from blowing out

8. Salisbury Cathedral

9. Gothic????

10. Gargoyles

11. Gargoyles • On top of and on sides of cathedrals • Used to scare off evil spirits • Grotesque • Often of horrific angels, animals, half human-half animal

12. Gothic revival • Begins in late 18th century (late 1700s) • Reaction to “Age of Reason” (Enlightenment) • 1600s and middle1700s • Tight, rigid, conformity • Gothic revival tied to extremes in emotions, thrill of fear • Romantic Era • Grew out of revolt and revolution

13. Romantic Era • Grew out of revolt and revolution • American Revolution (1776) • French Revolution (1789) • Individual was important • Creative, imaginative, think out of the box • Reaction to prior era (Enlightenment) which relied on reason • Beginnings of A & P and investigation into the body • Science challenged religion • Literature dealt with possibilities of human potential

14. Life became more reliant on technology, science • But some believed that too much reliance on reason could hurt humans • Take away what made humans human • Literature, art, etc. made it safe to let imagination run wild

15. “The sleep of reason produces monsters” Francisco Goya (1746-1828), Spanish artist

16. Gothic Literature • Mood • Dark, gloomy, creepy • Story w/bizarre, otherworldly, supernatural occurrences • Shock tactics of horrific events • Point of view • Often first-person narrator, often insane • Sometimes, multiple narrators • Same story told from different views • Many times a normal setting, but not quite

17. Setting usually includes large, drafty houses or castles (cities, factories, schools, etc.) • Atmosphere of mystery and suspense • A ghostly legend, unexplainable occurrence, or story of horrible death or murder • Omens, foreshadowing, and dreams

18. Highly charged emotional states (terror, insanity, anger, agitation, impending doom, obsessive love) • Supernatural events (ghosts, unexplained sounds, etc.) • Damsels in distress (women who are frightened, confused, lost, dying) • Words that evoke images of gloom and doom • Romantic themes involving death, obsessive love, excessive grief

19. The Nightmare J. H. Fuseli -- 1781

20. Gothic literature • The Castle of Otranto, Horace Walpole • First Gothic novel in 1764 • First vampire story • “The Vampyre” by John Polidori (1816) • Written at same time as Frankenstein

21. Not all horror stories are Gothic horror • But all Gothic stories have some element of horror

22. What’s the difference • Gothic – • Often involves gaining emotion from audience • Psychological insight • Story tends to be more ambiguous, not black and white, or just good and evil • Horror – • More grisly, less thought

23. Fear, Horror, Terror? • Fear – an unpleasant emotion caused by exposure to danger, expectation of pain • “Terror… creates an intangible atmosphere of spiritual psychic dread, a certain superstitious shudder at the other world. • “Horror resorts to a cruder presentation of the macabre: by an exact portrayal of the physically horrible and revolting, against a far more terrible background of spiritual gloom and despair. Horror appeals to sheer dread and repulsion, by brooding upon the gloomy and the sinister, and lacerates the nerves by establishing actual cutaneous contact with the supernatural...” • From Devendra P. Varma, The Gothic Flame (New York: Russell & Russell, 1966)

24. “The difference between Terror and Horror is the difference between awful apprehension and sickening realization: between the smell of death and stumbling against a corpse.” • From Devendra P. Varma, The Gothic Flame (New York: Russell & Russell, 1966)

25. Stephen King defines “terror” as the suspenseful moment in horror before the actual monster is revealed. “Horror,” King writes, “is that moment at which one sees the creature/aberration that causes the terror or suspense, a "shock value”… • “I recognize terror as the finest emotion and so I will try to terrorize the reader. But if I find that I cannot terrify, I will try to horrify, and if I find that I cannot horrify, I'll go for the gross-out. I'm not proud.” (Danse Macabre)