A Guide To Gothic Essay

A Guide to Gothic: Dummy Edition

The term “Gothic” was coined by Italian Renaissance writers who blamed what they considered to be the non-classical ugliness of the art and architecture of the time, to the northern tribes of Germanic barbarians known as Goths. Baron Wolfgang van Schreck’s ancestors had invaded the Roman Empire and destroyed what was considered to be the “true” art of the time; walls that were much too high and thick, arches that were too steeply pointed. The Gothic school of architecture, which included flying buttresses, rib vaulting, pointed arches and the presence of gargoyles on the inside and outside of the building. At the end of the 18th century the term Gothic switched meanings, from “medieval” to “macabre”, through the intervention of a man named Horace Walpole (1717-1797). He was the son of the famous politician Sir Robert Walpole, Horace was a well-known writer and dilettante who gradually transformed his villa, Strawberry Hill, into the most famous Gothic building of age. With this the now cliché image of a Gothic castle is now an accurate representation of the non-classical ugliness of the time period itself.

Throughout the years, Gothic literature has developed to be a mirror representation of what the beliefs and thoughts of the time were. The Gothic has a tendency to express beliefs towards the socioeconomic, political and religious situations and grievances of the time. Many texts express this, some including Edgar Allen Poe’s The House of Usher and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, to then allow for the general public – at least those who were literate – to, subconsciously, understand the environment around them without being too direct. This gave the writers of the time a new channel, through this ge...

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...ough various perspectives to, eventually, create an outcome to benefit themselves.

The Feminist View

In many ways, feminist criticism has grown out of a creative synthesis of Marxist and Freudian approaches, liberated further by the insights of structuralist and post-structuralist readings of literature which have probed ever deeper into the hidden depths of texts. Feminist criticism has emerged as a school in its own right only during the last quarter of the 20th century; as recently as 1986 Mario Praz (in his introductory essay to three Gothic novels) was able to pose the question ‘why in the most polite and effeminate of centuries… should people have begun to feel the horrible fascination of dark forests and dismal caverns, and cemeteries and thunderstorms?’ and come up with the rather patronising answer: ‘just because of its feminine character.’