Gothic Romance

Romanticism exhibits interest in the exotic, distant land. It has a nostalgia for the idealized past, commitment to political and social freedom and yearning to return to nature, use intuition and imagination to express intensely personal feelings. During the Romantic period, the concept of Sublime was used to connote a surpassing excellence. Edmund Burke’s A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful (1757) contributed to thinking on the subject of Sublime. The distinction between the beautiful and the sublime is ,as Burke puts it, The former is associated with brightness, smoothness and smallness, the later with the infinite, solitude, emptiness, darkness and terror. The sublime is associated with powerful emotions, along with spiritual and religious awe, with vastness and immensity, with the natural order of its grander manifestations. Whatever Burke said about terror and the inspiration of terror had a considerable influence on the Gothic novels. Gothic literature combines elements of horror and romance in a melodramatic fasion. It offers the joys of ineffable emotions, the thrills of fearfulness and awe inherent in the sublime and exposes the inevitable decay and collapse of human mind. Gothic romance is the type of novel that flourished in the 1760s onwards to 1820s in England and has had a considerable influence on the evolution of ghost stories, horror stories and fiction. Gothic romances were also known as the novel of terror for its supernatural aspects and mysterious plot leading to the dark underworld where an innocent heroine is tormented by an uncouth and lustful villain. The setting of the novel is usually dark and gloomy, either medieval ruins or haunted castles. The word Gothic originated from the early Germanic tribe, the Goths. Subsequently, the word came to signify anything medieval. During this period, a medieval type of architecture, characterized by the use of pointed arches, vaults, intricate recesses developed and became popular throughout the Western Europe. The term Gothic novel has an alternative term, the Gothic romance. One of the prototypes of this genre is Tobias Smollett’s Ferdinand Count Fathom (1753).The pioneer of this genre was Horace Walpole, whose novel The Castle of Otranto: a Gothic Story became very popular at that time. His legacy was carried on by novelists like Ann Radcliffe, in her The Mysteries of Udolpho, William Beckford (Vathek), Matthew Gregory Lewis (The Monk), William Godwin and other notable gothic writers. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, is considered the progenitor of horror films and Science Fiction. Later, this particular genre, especially, Mrs. Radcliffe’s work was satirized by Jane Austen in her novel, Northanger Abbey. The Gothic literature had some features in common, like, “it chronicles the tribulation of imperiled heroes and heroines whose plight is made all the more dire by virtue of their imprisonment in strongholds full of secret chambers connected by byzantine passageways.” Cannon Schmitt The setting of these novels were often in unreal world of haunted castles, not navigable , offering ineffable horrors and monstrous Dukes and Viscounts. There are some features typical of this genre. They are- unnerving setting, like a haunted castle, atmosphere steeped in mystery and suspense, ominous signs and curses, nightmares, a typical villain or an antihero, a damsel in distress, a love story, emotional distress resulted from the love affair, fear and paranormal or supernatural activity. The setting of the novel is supposed to be gloomy, like an ancient, haunted castle, furnished with dungeons, moats, secret doorways, intricate passages, sliding panels. The story concentrates on the torture inflicted in an innocent heroine by a cruel lascivious villain. The Gothic novel is also characterized by its abundant use of the ghosts, apparitions, mysterious figures, supernatural incidents. The novelists aimed at evoking spine chilling terror, by presenting mysterious events and horrific atmosphere. Mikhail Bakhtin indicates that ‘the castle’, the Gothic’s distinctive chronotope, or literary fusion of space and time, the apparently perverse spiral qualities of medieval fortresses in these novels bear a specific temporal resonance, suggesting premodern feudal oppression and irrationality. ‘In Walpole’s , Radcliffe’s , Maturin and others, architectural antiquity and opacity give the lie to Enlightenment beliefs about clarity, rationality and progress.’ It is difficult to find a way in such Gothic castles, its convoluted paths metaphorically signals the uncertainties of epistemology- of the possibility of knowing others or even knowing the self. Radcliffe and her contemporaries set the action of their novels in a Manichean world of good and evil, where the role of the villain is often occupied by rapacious, aristocrats, self-centered man driven by their own passion. The term Gothic was later widely used by the novelists for the kind of fiction, which develops a gloomy atmosphere of terror and often the events in the story represent something uncanny or macabre, and violent. It may also deal with aberrant psychological states, like in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1817).Later; the novels of this genre were interpreted from a psychoanalytic perspective, as the external manifestation of the internal fear, guilt and perverse impulses of a civilized mind.