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A fashionable style
The fashion for ‘Gothic’ permeated almost every aspect of life, and
lingered on well into the reign of Queen Victoria (1837 - 1901), when much
new architecture reflected the Gothic Revival: many parish churches,
village schools and railway stations were built in sham medieval style. Old
castles such as Windsor and Belvoir, which had been modernised, had
their ancient battlements restored at great expense, and the writer Horace
Walpole turned his house, Strawberry Hill, into a mock medieval mansion,
complete with ornate plaster vaulting. This became so fashionable that he
was inundated with visitors wanting to see it.
The fashion for ruined castles was so strong that those who had new
estates without real ruined castles on them would sometimes build
themselves a ‘ruin’ as an interesting feature of landscape gardening.
% Her tales do not take place in the distant past, but are set amongst
medieval castles and monasteries in France, Switzerland and Italy
% She makes use of fear of supernatural horrors without supernatural
events actually occurring
% She suggests horrific discoveries which turn out to be harmless: for
example, the ghastly sight behind the black veil which Jane Austen’s
heroine Catherine Morland (in Northanger Abbey) is so frightened of
when reading The Mysteries of Udolpho, turns out to be not a real
skeleton but a wax model.
%
Female suffering
Generally the sufferings of heroines in Gothic novels are not allowed to be
slight. Imprisonment, rape, murder – often at the hands of perverted nuns
or monks – such things are commonplace, especially in the novel The
Monk by Matthew Gregory Lewis, published in 1796, which earned him the
nickname ‘Monk’ Lewis. (Lewis, incidentally, was a guest of Lord Byron at
the Swiss villa where Byron started a ‘competition’, among friends staying
with him, to write a Gothic novel, which resulted in Mary Shelley’s
Frankenstein.)
Mere escapism?
Such novels today might well be regarded as sheer escapism and to Jane
Austen, writing in the early nineteenth century, the fact that such works
appeared to be totally divorced from reality made their immense popularity
suspect. She mocked such novels in Northanger Abbey, warning young
ladies of being too easily taken in by the pleasures of the ‘circulating
library’. The sensible Henry Tilney’s gentle rebuke to Catherine questions
the public taste for improbable horror:
Consult your own understanding, your own sense of the probable, your
own observation of what is passing around you … what ideas have you
been admitting?
Ongoing influence
If the taste for medievalism went hand in hand with the unbelievable in the
Gothic horror novel, it also strongly influenced more serious 19th century
writers such as the Brontës and Dickens, and 20th century and 21st
century writers such as Mervyn Peake, Angela Carter and Margaret
Atwood.
Gothic fiction
Gothic fiction emerged in the late eighteenth century as a sub-genre
within the larger field of the novel. It was initiated by Horace Walpole with
The Castle of Otranto (1764) and reached the height of its popularity
towards the end of the century with such novels as Ann Radcliffe’s The
Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) and Matthew Lewis’ The Monk (1796).
Elizabeth Gaskell also uses the image of the monster in her novel Mary
Barton (1848), which is about industrial interest in the rapidly growing city
of Manchester. Like many other writers, she tends to confuse the name of
the monster with that of his creator, but the force of her comment is clear:
‘The actions of the uneducated seem to me typified in those of
Frankenstein, that monster of many human qualities, ungifted with a soul
or a knowledge of the difference between good and evil.’ (Mary Barton,
chapter 15).