BAC littérature anglais : gothic story

Oral Littérature anglaise

Gothic:

Introduction:

Gothic literature is a famous literary genre that appeared at the end of the 18th century in England. Gothic stories often occur in remote castles or gloomy mansions where frail young women have to cope with mysterious and odd events. First, it is important to highlight the fact that the Gothic genre implies what we call “a writing of excess” The Gothic novel is a direct answer to eighteenth century ideals of formal realism, which is why it is essential to understand formal realism first before defining Gothic literature. Formal realism is about creating a reality through the experience of one single character. Its focus lies in the internal drama of the individual rather than the external and explores individual consciousness and perception.

We may wonder ourselves how can fiction serve a form of social realism.

To answer my problem, first I will talk about a famous Edgar Allan Poe film that is "The tell tale heart", then the film directed by the author Hitchcock who is Rebecca and finally my personal document is Frankenstein by Shelley.

Developpement:

First, America has seen the emergence of mass media like literature in 18th century. One of the most famous authors of this era is Edgar Allan Poe. He is known mainly for his detective stories like The Stolen Letter but also for his Gothic stories. Gothic plays with feelings but does not convey a particular message. In this little story, Poe allows us through his writing style to be involved in the story of the murder of an old man using Gothic style. Poe is in an internal point of view, he uses a narrator whose only desire to kill an old man for no particular reason, he is a victim of madness and cannot control himself: we call this state « slip personality ». We can see that because he switches between calm statements to nervous outbursts. We have an erratic way of telling things. We can feel panic because of way of writing. He leave the reader with unresolved questions and doubts like the first line “True!—nervous—very, very dreadfully nervous I had been and am (...) but why will you say I am mad?

Then, the gothic genre sometimes highlights women; these women are often in distress. It allow to appeal to the pathos and sympathy of the reader who sides with those sobbing, distraught female characters. The social status of women in gothic fiction fits in with the genre : the narrator is an orphan, she works as a solitary woman for an unbearable matron. She was proposed by Mister de Winter but she was terrified because she doesn't belong to his "sort of world" ( elle n’appartient pas au meme monde). The Gothic genre is shown in several points. All the mysteries are focused on Manderley and the killed woman of Maxime. In one excerpt, we can cite many adjectives revealing this mystery as "isolated gray stone manor", or "muddy pools" for atmosphere. There is also here this rule of excess as in the story of Poe which is represented by the unknown heroine: she is extremely naive and clumsy and she is self deprecating too.

Like I said previously, gothic novels focus on the mysterious and supernatural. In Frankenstein, Shelley,

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