The Gothic

The Gothic

3 Ongoing Philosophical Discussions....

The Sublime:

"The passion caused by the great and sublime in nature . . . is Astonishment; and astonishment is that state of the soul, in which all its motions are suspended, with some degree of horror. In this case the mind is so entirely filled with its object, that it cannot entertain any other." [Edmund Burke, On the Sublime , 1756 ed. J. T. Bolton. 58]

The Sublime Experience

Sublime experiences, whether in nature or in art, inspire awe and reverence, and an emotional understanding that transcends rational thought and words or language. For Romantics, the sublime is a meeting of the subjective-internal (emotional) and the objective-external (natural world): we allow our emotions to overwhelm our rationality as we experience the wonder of creation. (https://www.webpages.uidaho.edu/engl_258/lecture%20notes/sublime.htm)

terror v. horror:

Although the novels commonly referred to as "Gothic" are united by certain thematic and stylistic conventions, they seem to vary a great deal in the emotional responses they seek to elicit from readers. Ann Radcliffe herself was among the first to draw an affective dividing line down the middle of the newly emergent genre. Conservative and rational in her own approach to the Gothic, Radcliffe clearly objected to the shocking scenes depicted in The Monk, and it is widely believed that she wrote The Italian as a protesting response to Lewis' novel. She elucidated her stance in an 1826 essay entitled "On the Supernatural in Poetry," in which draws upon Edmund Burke in order to distinguish between terror and horror in literature. She argues that terror is characterized by "obscurity" or indeterminacy in its treatment of potentially horrible events; it is this indeterminacy that leads the reader toward the sublime. Horror, in contrast, "nearly annihilates" the reader's responsive capacity with its unambiguous displays of atrocity.

Although Radcliffe uses examples from Shakespeare, rather than Gothic novels, to articulate her position, later critics have consistently adopted the terms "terror" and "horror" to distinguish between the two major strains of the Gothic represented by Radcliffe and Lewis respectively. Devendra Varma was one of the first critics to seize upon this distinction, characterizing the difference between terror and horror as the difference between "awful apprehension and sickening realization," with Radcliffe the sole representative of the former and Beckford, Maturin, Shelley and Godwin allied with Lewis in representing the latter. Robert Hume has also embraced this distinction, although in slightly different terms: he argues that the horror novel replaces the ambiguous physical details of the terror novel with a more disturbing moral and psychological ambiguity. In a sharp rebuttal to Hume, Robert Platzner has questioned the rigid categories of terror and horror, quoting from Udolpho to demonstrate that Radcliffe herself often crosses the line between the two. He calls for a more methodical and text- oriented approach to characterizing the Gothic novel (http://graduate.engl.virginia.edu/enec981/Group/chris.terror.html)

Schmoop Says....

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/articles/4ygDxP440MPyhKstfXlXJg2/if-your-world-goes-a-bit-gothic-here-s-how-to-survive

a creepy locale inspired by Medieval buildings

a crazy-evil villain with no apparent redeemable qualities

a damsel-in-distress

a not-your-average-hero hero

a few otherworldly (usually from Hell) creatures

and a lot—we mean a lot of suspenseful and even offensive emotional appeals.

Female gothic-->Radcliffean Gothic

In Literary Women, Moers claims that the Female Gothic is "easily defined: the work that

women writers have done in the literary mode that, since the eighteenth century, we have called

the Gothic" (90).

https://www.theguardian.com/books/interactive/2014/may/09/reading-gothic-novel-pictures

heroine

enclosed spaces

marriage as threat-- weird rushed happy marriage ending