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THE
GOTHIC CANON
These
walls,' said he, 'were once the seat of luxury and vice. They
exhibited a singular instance of the retribution of Heaven, and
were from that period forsaken, and abandoned to decay.' His words
excited my curiosity, and I enquired further concerning their
meaning.
Ann Radcliffe, A Sicilian Romance
Often criticized for its sensationalism, melodramatic qualities,
and its play on the supernatural, the Gothic novel dominated
English literature from its conception in 1764 with the
publication of The Castle of Otranto by Horace Walpole to
its 'supposed' demise in 1820. The genre drew many of its intense
images from the graveyard poets intermingling a landscape of vast
dark forest with vegetation that bordered on excessive, concealed
ruins with horrific rooms, monasteries and a forlorn character who
excels at the melancholy.
A fabled spectre or perhaps a bleeding Nun were images often
sought after by those who fell victim to the supernatural
influences of these books. Gothic literature as a movement was a
disappointment to the idealistic romantic poets for the
sentimental character idealized by Ann Radcliffe could not
transcend into reality.
The modern critical view of the Gothic canon limits it to a set of
high reaching artistic achievements: Horace Walpole's The
Castle of Otranto (1764), Ann Radcliffe's The Italian; or,
The Confessional of the Black Penitents (1797), Mary Shelley's
Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (1818) and Charles
Maturin's Melmoth the Wanderer (1820) are cited as the
defining parameters of the genre.
Although the Gothic novel influenced many of the emerging genres,
like romanticism, the outpouring of Gothic novels started to ease
by 1815 and with the publication of Charles Maturin's Melmoth
the Wanderer in 1820 ,the genre began to fade. The Gothic
novel had come full circle, from rebellion to the Age of Reasons
order, to its encompassing and incorporation of Reason as derived
from terror. The influence of the Gothic novel is felt today in
the portrayal of the alluring antagonist, whose evil
characteristics appeal to ones sense of awe, or the melodramatic
aspects of romance, or more specifically in the Gothic motif of a
persecuted maiden forced apart from a true love.
The Gothic genre today has remained an elusive minor literary
upheaval that has had immense influence on genres today. Literary
critics though, have been slow to accept Gothic literature as a
valuable genre. The first critics to examine the Gothic,
approached it reverently with historical interest. They tried to
rescue it, to revive the dead and obscure genre. These critics
looked at the presence of the text by examining it within a
historical context. The original critical approach of historical
interpretation allowed the text to validate the text, as it was a
reaction to the age of reason, order, and politics of Eighteenth
century England.
The development of the Gothic Novel from the melancholy overtures
of sentimental literature to the rise of the sublime in the
graveyard poets had a profound impact on the budding Romantic
movement from Wordsworth to Shelley. The astounding features and
use of the sublime and the overt use of the supernatural,
profoundly influenced the style and material of the emerging
romantics. Gothic Novels such as The Castle of Otranto by
Horace Walpole, The Adventures of Ferdinand Count Fathom by
Tobias Smollett, Longsword, Earl of Salisbury by Thomas
Leland, The Old English Baron: A Gothic Story by Clara
Reeve and Vathek: An Arabian Tale by William Beckford led
Coleridge to write a Gothic drama, Shelley to write two Gothic
Novels and Byron to write Manfred.
The effects of the Gothic still reverberate though modern
literature from Joyce Carol Oats to Ann Rice. The literary motifs
set forth by Horace Walpole can be found scattered throughout all
forms of literature, yet the Gothic Novel has been left to molder
in libraries in obscurity and except in rare instances, the novel
has all but vanished from the canon of western literature.
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