The Gothic Novel

The Gothic Novel

Introduction - The Gothic novel was the prose counterpart of Early Romanticism, which had already found its best expression in poetry. It was a more or less conscious revolt against the realism of such writers as Richardson and Fielding. It aimed at thrilling the reader rather than amusing or educating him. Hence its plots are normally set in an imaginary past time, usually the Middle Ages, and in strange, unfamiliar countries, with episodes full of horrible murders, extraordinary situations and supernatural events quite often occurring in haunted castles, prisons, convents and any other type of "Gothic" building. In order to recreate the so-called "Gothic gloom", these buildings were typically endowed with secret passages, long dark corridors and dreadful dungeons, and were usually surrounded by thick forests and impenetrable woods. Nor was there any lack of ghastly moonlight or thunderstorms, natural phenomena being essential ingredients of Gothicism.

Following Burke's theories of the horrid and the sublime (see p. 381), the Gothic novelists discovered the charm of horror and the power of sensation, now connected with the grotesque and the supernatural. Although their characters were mainly stereotypes and their heroines all embodied the myth of the persecuted maiden, in the fashion begun by Richardson's Clarissa, they reopened the gates of fancy and imagination, which had been closed by Augustan rationalism, thus channeling visions, dreams and terrors into fiction.

Some of these elements could already he found in the melancholy nocturnes of Blair and Young, or in Percy's ballads, not to mention Milton's Satan, Marlowe's Faustus and even Shakespeare's use of the supernatural. The beginning of the Gothic Novel is nevertheless usually traced to 1764,_the year of the publication of Walpole's Castle of Otranto.

Walpole - Horace Walpole (1717-l797), the youngest son of Sir Robert Walpole (the famous Whig minister) and close friend of Gray, had always had a natural penchant for the horrid and fantastic.

Fond of the Middle Ages and medieval chivalry, he had tried to revive the atmosphere of that time, first through architecture (he had a mansion built at Strawberry Hill, which he remodelled into "a little Gothìc castle ') and then through literature.

The Castle of Otranto - When he wrote The Castle of Otranto, he originally claimed to have translated it from the Italian, But he soon admitted his authorship when, against his expectations, the work met with immediate success, in spite of its apparently nonsensical plot, which even a fairly detailed summary can hardly do justice to.

Plot - Manfred, the usurper prince of Otranto, wishes to marry his son Conrad to Isabella, the daughter of the legitimate heir. On the night before the wedding, however, Conrad is crushed to death under a huge helmet. The peasant Theodore then discovers that the helmet resembles one missing from the statue of Alfonso the Good, a former ruler. In need of a new heir to save his realm, Manfred announces that he will divorce his wife to marry Isabella.

Isabella flees from Manfred by an underground passage, and is given refuge by the priest, Father Jerome. During this episode, she meets and falls in love with Theodore, who is also loved by Manfred's daughter, Matilda.

The story is now complicated by the arrival of Isabella's father, Frederick, Marquis of Vicenza and the closest relative to the last legitimate ruler, Alfonso.

Manfred suggests a double wedding (be with Isabella, Frederick with Matilda) at which point, three drops of blood fall from the statue's nose in protest.

Manfred confesses that it was his grandfather who had poisoned Alfonso and had been fraudulently proclaimed his heir. Matilda is then killed by her father, who mistakes her for Isabella, and the castle is shaken by thunder

The huge ghost of Alfonso appears in the ruins, declaring Theodore as his true heir. The new prince, Theodore, marries Isabella, while Manfred and his wife finish their lives repenting in a convent.

The Helmet - If one expectecl fo find a rational exation of the mysterious helmet, one would he disappointed. No attempt was in fact made by Walpole to account for either the helmet and the apparitions, or the voices and strange lights which he deliberately spread throughout the work.

Piranesi - The great use Walpole made of the supernatural was partly inspired by the engravings of the Italian architect, Piranesi (1720-l778). In 1761 Piranesi had completed the carceri (Prisons), a series of etchings showing imaginary gloomy dungeons surmounted by dark arches, crossed by impossible bridges and stairs leading nowhere, all filled with hideous instruments of death.

Walpole had been deeply impressed by this work, which he considered the proper answer to Burke's theory of the sublime, and had in fact defined it 'a sublime dream", perhaps because of its play of light and shade. Two particular elements in these pictures probably struck his imagination: the disproportion between the majestic architecture and the tiny ures of men peopling the dungeons and, perhaps, the images of plumed helmets that appear in one or two of the etchings.

Whatever the source, the novel, with its blend of love story, persecution and the supernatural, is remarkable for the innovations it brought to traditional fiction since:

it showed how to employ Gothic devices (dungeons, ghosts, etc.) in connection with old

romance elements (young people in love, etc.);

it taught how to use the forces of nature (gusts of wind, etc.) to create an atmosphere;

it provided a new type of character, in the person of Theodore. Dark-haired, handsome, mysterious and melancholy, he would become a model for the future Byronic hero.

The Castle of Otranto started a mode and the so-called 'School of Terror". One of the outstanding writers of this School was Ann Radcliffe (1764-l823), who contributed to Gothic fiction with several works including A Romance of the Forest (1791), The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) and The Italian (1797). It is in The Italian that Ann Radcliffe created the celebrated character of Schedoni, aristocratic, mysterious, pale and passionate. With his melancholy but piercing eyes, he too would become a model, perhaps the most influential of all, for some of Byron's heroes.

Like Walpole, Radcliffe also attempted to arouse terror and suspense but, unlike him, she found rational solutions to the manifold mysteries displayed in her books, and employed natural scenery to create a proper background to apparently supernatural phenomena.

Beckford - Mrs. Radcliffe was not, however, the direct heir of Walpole. In 1786, William Beckford (1759-l844) had published Vatbek, an oriental tale originally written in French. Set at the time of the Caliphs and against a background of fictitious and imaginary "Araby', the book reproposed the old myth of Faustus, who sold his soul in exchange for knowledge. With his oriental landscape, recalling scenes from the Arabian Nights, Beckford thus added another exotic touch to Gothic fiction.

Lewis - It was nevertheless in another work that Gothicism reached a climax: The Monk (1796). Written by M.G. Lewis (1775-l818) when he was only twenty, this novel supplemented the traditional Gothic devices with large doses of violence, eroticism, witchcraft and anti-Catholic bias (the plot being set in the Spain of the inquisition), the whole blended with great skill.

With The Monk, the Gothic stream seemed to have dried up, since, for about twenty years, no other important work of the type was printed. But "Gothicism is a stream that goes underground, out of sight, for long periods, and then reappears in different forms". Hence the publication in the full flood of Romanticism, at the very beginning of the 19th century, of two more books, different from previous Gothic novels as well as from each other.

Maturin - The more complex of these was Melmoth the Wanderer (1820) by CR. Maturin (1782-l824) who, although sharing with "Monk" Lewis the same love for the horrid and the supernatural, made use of a subtler psychological analysis and a more modem literary technique.

But the more popular of the two, and perhaps the most popular Gothic novel of all, was a small book written by a young girl not yet twenty.

Mary Shelley - In the wet summer of 1816, Mary Shelley (1797-l851), the daughter of William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft and second wife of the Romantic poet Shelley, was in Switzerland with her husband, Byron and other friends.

When, to pass the time, a ghost-story competition was proposed, she wrote Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus, claiming she had been inspired by a dream. The work was published in 1818 and immediately became a best-seller

Although distorted by a series of subsequent film adaptations, the plot of the novel is so well known that it needs only the briefest of summaries. Frankenstein, a Swiss scientist, succeeds after long study in creating a living human being who, strong and powerful as he is ugly and revolting, eventually turns into a murderer and finally destroys his own creator.

Frankenstein - The work is less simplistic than is generally believed, however, since, for the first time, a Gothic novel was concerned with moral and ethical questions, the main one being the misuse man can make of science. As a 'modern Prometheus', Frankenstein actually manipulates nature, but his "creature" soon gets out of his control. The science theme, which makes Mary Shelley a precursor of modem science fiction, interweaves with others, such as social injustice or the Rousseauesque conception of man as originally good. As long as he does not come into contact with society, in fact, the monster shows love and generosity towards everybody, But his love turns into hatred and violence when he finds himself rejected because of his hideous appearance, thus becoming an early prototype of the outsider, rejected by society because of his "difference".

The book develops through a series of letters from a Robert Walron to his sister, in which he tells her of the misfortunes of a Swiss scientist (Frankenstein), whose narrative he reports in the form of a manuscript. Written in the 18th-century epistolary form and in a simple, unsophisticated language, the story may appear confusing and at times even improbable or absurd.

Romanzo Gotico: prima metà del '700 - si sviluppa con le paure della gente verso le nuove macchine industriali.