THE GOTHIC GENRE





    During the last decades of the eighteenth century, England found itself in the midst of a societal unravelling. The philosophies of Shaftesbury, Adam Smith and David Hume, which for most of the century had provided the intellectual classes with theories of action and motivation that justified their self-interested behaviour, began to reveal themselves as insupportable. The contradiction between the English ideology in which individual desires and collective needs participated in perfect reciprocity and actual economic and political conditions began to surface. Incidents like the Gordon riots in 1780 (as well as the utterly terrifying reality of complete Revolution just across the Channel) revealed a rupture in what had been thought of as the time and place of the "well-bred gentleman".

    It is out of this social climate that the Gothic novel grew: a new and fearful genre for a new and fearful time. The spectre of social revolution is manifest in the supernatural "spectres" of the Gothic: a crumbling way of life emerges as a crumbling and haunted Gothic manor, the loss of English social identity becomes the Gothic hero or heroine's search for identity. The Gothic is often critized or even dismissed for its overly melodramatic scenarios and utterly predictable plots, but the incredible popularity of the genre in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, as well as the "comeback" of gothic narratives within the past two decades, points to a resiliance that cannot be overlooked.
 
 


 
 

* The Gothic novel

* A Gothic writer woman

Return