Gothic fiction: main features

Gothic fiction : main features

1. Characters

• 18th century: specters, monsters, ghosts, demons, skeletons, evil aristocrats, monks, nuns, fainting heroins and bandits.
• 19th century: idem+ scientists, fathers, husbands, madmen, criminals, monstrous doubles (duplicity and evil nature).
• 20th century: psychopaths, extraterrestrials,

1. Settings

• Castles or medieval edifices full of hidden passageways, abbey, churches , graveyards in ruinous state, old houses or mansions, desolate landscapes full of menace, wild and mountainous locations, labyrinthine streets of modern cities.
• In the 20th century: alienating bureaucratic and technological reality, psychiatric hospitals, intergalactical worlds

Quotation by Emily Dickinson (1863): “One need not be a chamber to be haunted

                                                                One need not be a house;

                                             The brain has corridors surpassing

                                             Material place”

1. Elements of the plot

• Tortuous, fragmented narratives relating mysterious incidents, horrible images and life-threatening pursuits, magical worlds, tales of knights, extravagant adventures and terrors, supernatural , sensational and terrifying incidents

1. Effects on the reader

• Emotional effects rather than a rational or properly cultivated response.
• Chills the blood, delights superstitious fancies and feeds uncultivated appetites for marvellous and strange events, no moral lessons.
• Repugnance, disgust but also fascination and attraction

Quotation by Joyce Carol Oates (1994): “And this is the forbidden truth, the unspeakable taboo that evil is not always repellent but frequently attractive; that it has the power to make us not simply victims, as nature and accident do, but active accomplices.”

1. Aims of gothic fiction

• Subverting the mores and manners on which social behavior rests.
• Transgression: celebrate criminal behavior, voracious passion
• Reasserting the values of society and their necessity

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