The History & Definition of the Gothic

Once upon a time there was a rather ordinary man who bought a rather ordinary farm just outside of London. Oddly enough, this seemingly insignificant event would be just the thing to inspire the beginning of the Gothic novel, one of the most intriguing and long-lasting literary genres.

The beginning of the Gothic genre reminds me more of one of those silly games you would play with friends in high school than anything you would bother to study in college. You know those words you would make up, or the nicknames, or the funny good luck rituals...things like that. It all started with that ordinary guy and his long-time buddies getting really silly over that ordinary farm.

Basically, Horace Walpole, the author of the first Gothic novel, The Castle of Ontranto, bought some property with a nice, boring little farm cottage named Strawberry Hill around 1749. Within a year Walpole had decided to enlarge his new property into a castle in the English Gothic style. He, with a little help from his old college buddies, began acquiring medieval artifacts - whatever they could find cheap (Walpole wasn't a poor man, but he wasn't fabulously wealthy either...like I said earlier, he was just an ordinary guy). This renovation kept going well into the 1770s, its only guiding principle being whatever architectural feature Walpole and his friends found particularly appealing at the time and perpetuated the Gothic mood of the place. The collection of artifacts and trophies that gathered over the years were supposed to have been taken or won somehow by Sir Terry Robsart, an adventurous ancestor invented by Walpole and his friends (undoubtedly in those late-night male bonding sessions that involved a generous amount of brandy poured through happy clouds of cigar smoke).

Strawberry Hill's transformation is significant for two reasons. First, it sparked a shift in 18th century opinions of the gothic in general; and second, it served as the setting for The Castle of Ontranto.

Though Walpole's life was largely uneventful, he was the son of an extremely powerful politician and Lord. As a man of society, he did have some influence in social circles. His efforts at Strawberry Hill marked the first important occasion that anyone had been so enthusiastically interested in the Middle Ages, and because of Walpole's political and cultural influences, people all over England and Europe would come to visit and admire his charming monstrosity. Walpole essentially took the rude, crude, and (at the time) socially unacceptable impressions of the word "gothick" and turned them into an ancient, heroic, romantic, and even a little charmingly decadent concept.

The Gothic was now intriguing instead of repulsive. This cultural transition enabled Walpole's book (published on Christmas Eve 1764) to become quite popular; it was even adapted into a play around 1781. Towards the end of the 18th century the Gothic novel was well established as a separate genre generating hundreds of imitations of Walpole's work, as well as the appearance of the true indicator of popularity: the parody.

So, with all that said, what makes a Gothic novel "Gothic"?

The genre is sometimes hard to really pin a definition on since much of it revolves around a more intangible impression and general oppressive atmosphere than any specific attribute, but there are a few concrete elements that make a work distinctly Gothic.

First, there's the setting. Gothic writing is often set in old, drafty, crumbling buildings like castles, churches, or neglected estates. The buildings themselves often take on a personality in the work, becoming one of the main characters. Their architecture is heavy and gloomy, reflecting the mood of the whole work, and becoming symbolic of the decay that is usually reflected in the characters' moral, emotional, or psychological state as their interaction with this building is prolonged.

The next element (some would say this is the most important element), is that a Gothic work usually deals with the supernatural in some form or another. Certainly not all Gothic work is concerned with the supernatural, but traditionally this is a key ingredient. Historically, the genre emerged just after the Enlightenment, which was a movement focused on reason and attempting to eradicate superstition. It is the general philosophy that nurtured the blossoming art of science and the pragmatic questioning of the Catholic Church. The authors of the Gothic novels not only revived an interest in the supernatural, but allowed their audience to re-experience their connections to the ancient and the unknown.

Cruelty and violence are also associated with the Gothic, but some critics say that the genre moved away from these attributes once Edgar Allan Poe contributed "The Fall of the House of Usher." This, as well as many of Poe's other famous works, focused less on these obvious physical elements, and more on the unseen, inner struggles of emotion and insanity. The violence is still there, of course, but sometimes it takes on a more subtle role, allowing the reader to explore the executor's state of mind instead of focusing on the act of violence itself.

With these basic elements in mind, we can see that the genre isn't all about the gratuitous blood and guts that we torture ourselves with in those campy horror novels or films. In fact, the less blood and guts there are, the more genuinely gothic the piece seems to become.

The truly Gothic isn't about cheap thrills and seeing how many appetites you can ruin. The Gothic genre is about psychological disturbance, not about making you jump out of your seat when someone leaps out of a closet and says "boo!" It's about that lingering, nagging feeling of discomfort that you take with you even after you've finished reading a book or seeing a film. A Gothic writer has to learn how to manipulate the unknown and the unexplainable in a way that will resonate with their audience long after the book has been lent to the reader’s sister's ex-roommate, or the movie is out of the theater.