Origins and Influence of the Gothic Novel

Gothic Novel — 4.1.1 The Historical Context

Origins of the Term and Early Interpretations

• The word gothic derives from the Goths, one of several Germanic tribes that contributed to the demise of the Roman Empire in the 4th century.
• Historians regarded the Goths generically as all Germans, including the Anglo-Saxons who settled in the British Isles.
• From this position later historians came to proclaim a native gothic tradition within British culture opposed to foreign imperialism as epitomised by the Norman invasion of 1066.
• In the 18th century this interpretation of history found adepts among those who saw authoritarian monarchy as anachronistic.
• The Goths were thus seen as lovers of freedom, whose celebration in turn invited greater contemporary freedom achieved by means of political reform.
• The reformist wing of the Whig party embraced such ideals in opposition to Tory ideology.
• When the term gothick (as it was frequently spelt) became common in the mid-18th century, it seems to have referred to the medieval rather than to the pre-Conquest period.
• Thus, the text generally taken to be the first (and also archetypal) gothic novel, Walpole’s Castle of Otranto, was subtitled A Gothic Story to hint at the period in which it was set: the medieval.

Walpole, Deception, and the Medieval Setting

• In fact Walpole fabricated an elaborate deceit that the novel was written by an Italian canon, Onuphrio Muralto, between the 11th and 13th centuries.
• The gothic came to be associated with recovering a tradition which valued feelings and sensibility, and which had been obliterated by the dominance of reason as the key to all human problems (cf. pp. 20–21).

Reaction Against the Enlightenment

• Reason and rationality achieved this pre-eminence as characteristics of the historical phenomenon known as the Enlightenment. The 18th century was the high point of the Enlightenment, especially in Britain.
• In historical terms the medieval period pre-dated the Enlightenment, just as in terms of the growth of each person the emotions come before and can be seen as more profoundly human than rationality.
• In a sense the gothic revival was a reaction to more than a century of rationalism and empiricism. Writers in this tradition needed to cultivate shock tactics, thus the frequent insistence on horrific detail.
• The growth of rationalism caused a devaluation of religious experience, although not of religious belief itself.
• If nothing else, the gothic put many of its participants in touch with the supernatural, including the use of magic, contact with the dead, and the belief in idols and demons.