The Gothic

When Gothic fiction emerged in the latter half of the eighteenth century it found itself opposed by Enlightenment-era thinkers and writers wary of the genre’s predilection for chivalric romance and “Dark Age” supernaturalism. The typical Gothic text was seen by critics as unrepresentative of the modern age of reason, skeptical inquiry, and the scientific method. To their chagrin, the genre proved popular with the public.

Gothic literature seemed to confirm Protestant Britain’s fears about Catholicism, since Gothic stories tended to cast abbots as murdering rapists and depicted convents and churches as scenes of depravity. In their essay ‘Gothic Criticism’, authors Chris Baldick and Robert Mighall contest that Gothic fiction was not a reaction against the rationality and modernism of the Enlightenment, as critics of the time attested, and that Gothic writers in fact “display a thoroughly modern distrust of past centuries as ages of superstition and tyranny.” Gothic writers looked at the Dark Ages (their preferred term for the period, not mine) from a Protestant and Enlightenment perspective – though the supernatural existed in the tales of Horace Walpole and Matthew Lewis, Catholic dominance and feudalism were treated as corruptive institutions, and priestly celibacy only barely masked a sexual perversion that erupt into scenes of rape, torture, and murder.

“Enlightenment is man’s emergence from his self-caused immaturity,” claimed Immanuel Kant in his 1784 essay, What is Enlightenment? But because Gothic fiction appealed to the imagination and the metaphysical, most Augustan scholars considered it an undue literary phenomenon running in opposition to this emergence. The very term ‘Gothic’ then came into common usage as a critical slur signifying barbarism and unenlightenment. Nineteenth century architect and scholar Thomas Roger Smith noted that “The word Gothic was invented at a time when a Goth was synonymous with everything that was barbarous; and its use then implied a reproach. It denotes … all the styles invented and used by the Western barbarians who overthrew the Roman Empire, and settled within its limits.”

As the “destroyers” of Classical civilisation, the Gothic tribes of Europe were demonised and ridiculed by the societies for whom they had paved the way, but who in turn claimed cultural descendance from Rome. When Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto appeared in 1764 it was received warmly under the guise of a translation of an ancient Catholic text. When a second edition was released with a preface admitting that Walpole was the original author, the book was decried by the Monthly Review as an atavistic return to “a gross and unenlightened age”, with Walpole himself labelled “an advocate for re-establishing the barbarous superstitions of Gothic devilism!” In response to the criticism regarding his novel, Walpole privately wrote that it “was not written for this age, which wants nothing but cold reason.”

Aversion to any revival of interest in the Middle Ages was rife. The thirteenth century poet Petrarch had mourned that his epoch was a dark age that interrupted Classical learning, and it was from him that the pejorative term Dark Age came to be a synonym for the Early Middle Ages. “Much was believ’d, but little understood,” said eighteenth century poet Alexander Pope of Petrarch’s time, “and to be dull was constru’d to be good; a second deluge thus o’er-run, and the Monks finish’d what the Goths begun.” As the Enlightenment reigned in Pope’s time, medieval keeps and edifices had fallen into disrepair, standing as a crumbling reminder of barbarian/Popish impropriety, excess, and failure. Gothic fiction, by featuring, beautifying and titivating these structures, was seen as a desire to return to the methodologies and beliefs of the Dark Ages. The Gothic inheritance was attacked by German writer and poet Johann Ulrich König, who contested that:

“The so-called Nordic peoples flooded the whole of Europe with their ignorance and with that Bad Taste which clung permanently to their descendants; this can still be recognised today from the remains, among other things, of their badly composed writings, rambling romances, immoderate passion for rhyming, clumsy monkish script, coarse-sounding speech, barbarous music, graceless costumes, badly-drawn paintings, and above all from their Gothic architecture.”

In opposition, poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge argued the tribes and dynasties of Europe in fact contributed to, not detracted from, posterity. According to Coleridge, the Goths had passed on “The love of the marvellous, the deeper sensibility, the higher reverence for womanhood, the characteristic spirit of sentiment and courtesy.” For Coleridge, the Gothic Revival was not a regression, but a very natural progression. It was the flowering of a long budding movement refined by Renaissance and Enlightenment thinking and communicated through the media of the modern novel. The onset of Romanticism helped usher in and complement Gothic fiction and tendencies. “As the period went on,” noted D.W. Harding in From Blake to Byron, “there was further use of fantasy as a means of giving expression … to emotional experience not sanctioned by the conventional good sense of the previous age, and perhaps not strictly accountable to reason.”

New ways of thinking led to new ways of composing literature, and Gothic and Romantic texts led the vanguard. The opium-influenced Coleridge wrote Kubla Khan; childhood memories of Stanstead Hall influenced Lewis’ description of Lindenberg Castle in The Monk; and a nightmare featuring a disembodied piece of armour drove Walpole to write Otranto. “The great resources of fancy have been dammed up by a strict adherence to common life,” Walpole claimed. It was up to him, with Otranto, to reconciliate the chivalric romance of old with the new novel format and sensibility. Walpole, in a tract ignored by the critics who scolded his work, compared his merging of these two forms to Classical art, via Shakespeare, who stood as the “model I copied” and whose amalgamating of “buffoonery and solemnity” reminded him “of the Grecian sculptor, who, to convey the idea of a Colossus within the dimensions of a seal, inserted a little boy measuring his thumb.” (Romantic poets too were known to invoke the Classical Muses in their work.) As Christopher MacLachlan notes in his introduction to Lewis’ The Monk, the modern novel and the period of Romanticism enabled Gothic literature to offer “a new way of reading and new ways of seeing the world and the individual’s place in it, however disturbing that might be.” The Gothic, then, like the Enlightenment thinkers who looked to Antiquity for inspiration, was very much a modern product dipping itself in bygone times.

But was the Gothic really a resurgence of long-spent supernaturalism, or the outpouring of already present (if not suppressed) phenomena? Joseph Addison’s 1715 comedic play The Drummer contained the line, “’Tis the solitude of the country that creates these whimsies; there was never such a thing as a ghost heard of at London, except in the play-house.” But later it would be in London that one of the eighteenth century’s most famous ghosts made a much publicised appearance in 1762 – and not in the theatre. The Cock Lane ghost, as it was known, was a spirit that allegedly communicated with visitors by knocking in response to questions. The spectre caused such a sensation that even Dr. Samuel Johnson paid a visit. Walpole himself visited the lodging house where the ghost made a show of itself. Walpole noted, “It rained torrents; yet the lane was full of mob, and the house so full we could not get in.” Though the writers and scholars of the age found supernatural tales to be in poor taste, there was, Walpole saw, a ravenous public ready to devour such things. The writer Anna Letitia Barbauld noted, “the apparent delight with which the tales of ghosts and goblins, of murders, earthquakes, fires, shipwrecks, and all the most terrible disasters attending human life are devoured by every ear, must have been generally remarked.”

Another 18th century phenomenon that Gothic literature tapped into was anti-Catholicism. Even after the calm in the decades following the Catholic uprisings of the Jacobites, Protestants were still wary of Catholic recusants who, in Protestant eyes, made themselves outsiders worthy of suspicion and distrust. In 1749, an anonymously published pamphlet titled Satan’s Harvest Home blamed Roman Catholic France and Italy for the spread of immorality and perversion, and even blamed nuns for popularising same-sex lasciviousness. John Wesley, author of Popery Calmly Considered, contested that Catholics were “so dangerous a body that they would always need penal laws to ensure they did not harm Protestants.” When anti-Catholic laws were to be repealed in 1780, Protestant mobs marched upon Parliament, where a riot broke out. Lords were attacked and soldiers summoned to quell the crowds. Houses were burned, Newgate Prison largely destroyed, and hundreds were killed, injured, and arrested.

Gothic fiction reflected this paranoia and anger, appropriating the trappings of the gloomy Catholic Dark Ages whilst retaining a modern suspicious view of Catholic practices. Secret confessions and ritualised customs like Mass and the veneration of idols and saints loaned themselves easily to Gothic subversion, and Gothic fiction made hells out of saintly places. Devendra P. Varma, in The Gothic Flame, notes that “Countless Gothic novels have in their titles ‘castle’, ‘abbey’, ‘priory’, ‘convent’ or ‘church.” These environments are not depicted as primarily picturesque, but grotesque – ancient, crumbling, replete with hidden passageways and subterranean vaults and host to murder and rape and Satanic rituals. Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto and Lewis’ The Monk take place on the Church-dominated Continent; Walpole’s story being set in Italy at the time of the Crusades, and Lewis’ in Spain at an undisclosed time. In Otranto, the castle provides not only a backdrop for the action but also gives the villain Manfred motivation – he wishes to secure his inheritance and all the powers that accompany the estate. This turns him murderous as well as incestuous. Walpole himself noted in the first edition to Otranto that, “The principal incidents” of the novel take place during the “darkest ages of Christianity.”

Catholic authority figures were scathed by Lewis. In The Monk‘s opening pages, the celebrated abbot Ambrosio sermonises to the people of Madrid, and the streets throng with attendants. Lewis depicts the laity as being drawn to Ambrosio’s sermons not out of piety, but as a sideshow, circus or grand event. “The women came to show themselves, the men to see the women: some were attracted by curiosity to hear an orator so celebrated.” The only piteous people in attendance are a “few antiquated devotees”, and rival orators who to try and “find fault with and ridicule the discourse.” Superstition is also said to rule “with a despotic sway” and “to seek for true devotion would be a fruitless attempt.” When Ambrosio finishes sermonising the crowds scramble to snatch beads from his fallen rosary. “Whoever became possessor of a bead, preserved it as a sacred relique,” a clear jab at Catholic Church’s policy of consecrating so-called holy items, which found Biblical justification in Acts 19:12: “so that even handkerchiefs and aprons that had touched him [Paul] were taken to the sick, and their illnesses were cured and the evil spirits left them.” Lewis depicts the inhabitants of Madrid as “dupes of deceptions” and feels contempt for the “gross absurdity of [the monks’] miracles, wonders, and superstitious reliques.” Privately, the apparently pious Ambrosio gives “loose to the indulgence of his vanity” upon remembering the passion he incited in the crowd and looks upon a bust of the Virgin with palpable lust. 

“English Romanticism,” Edgell Rickword states in From Blake to Byron, “was not in origin or intention escapist; its impulse is to be truly representative of human life in the broad sense, not merely the expression of a cultivated minority.” The Eighteenth century was a time of radical change for human society, and Gothic fiction reflected the desire of the public to see the dark past through a modern, critical lens. William Doyle, in The Oxford History of the French Revolution, writes that “persecution and harassment at the hands of the Church, or those under priestly influence, had given a growing band of speculative writers a sense of common purpose.” The printing press, along with the development of the modern novel, allowed Gothic writers to marry old chivalric tales with modern 18^th century sentiment and Papal criticism. The period was not one of mere transition between the ages of Enlightenment and Romance and Gothicism, but “a time during which many English people enlarged their outlook to include some understanding of the appeal both of the Romantics and of much that was antagonistic to them.”