"The Gothic is concerned primarily with representing transgression and taboo, there is nothing more to it as a literary genre." Is this a fair assessment of Gothic writing of the Romantic period?

Frankenstein’s monster could easily be a symbol of misguided radicalism them, a kind which Mary had no wish to ally herself to, a kind which produced Robespierre and resurrected the guillotine, which smashes machines and scoffs at monarchy.

Whether this is true or not the monster is certainly a victim of injustice. He was born innocent in accordance with the principle of the tabula rasa (blank slate) – a concept probably inherited by Mary from her father. The monster faces such unqualified rejections and ill-treatment from society the he embraces evil and negativity as his Weltanschauung: “I was once benevolent and good,” he says, “misery made me a fiend.”(Shelley, 101).

Just like the genre cannot be branded left or right but “a language of..division” (my italics) Shelley uses the form to mobilise a variety of interconnected but shifting discourses which prevent Frankenstein from being reducible to a series of simplistic binary oppositions like ‘conservative’ and radical; ‘rational’ or ‘emotional’; ‘moral’ or ‘immoral’. The central characters are similarly neither ‘good’ nor ‘bad’ but symbolic facets of Shelley’s themes such as class (see below).

A lot of new eighteenth and early nineteenth century literature was a site of ideological resistance to the dominant hegemony. For example the historically-based partisanship of characters in Hogg’s Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner suggest a dissatisfaction with the similar religious and political divides at the time of writing. A parallel theme is the distance between the rational (popular science) and the imaginative, the rural (traditional agrarianism) and the urban (industrial capitalism), the lowly (Ettrick) shepherd and the wealthy professional. These conflicts remain unresolved both in Hogg’s own life and in the book but it is ambiguously suggested that spiritual profundity of the rural is championed whilst the shallow empty rationality of the urban is condemned. This is clearly a class-related discourse that becomes concrete if one looks at the similar class conflict in Hogg’s own life.

Similar class discourses are also present in Frankenstein and Melmoth whose antiheroes operate outside of class so are able to observe its injustices from without. The monster empathises with the cultured but poor DeLacey family but finds the rich William Frankenstein an obnoxious oaf. In Frankenstein narrative Elizabeth is described as a different species “to the hardy little vagrants” in whose hut she lies, purely because she is the daughter of nobility. The monster does not see such distinctions because he is a product of nurture, not nature: a creature made into a fiend, as Elizabeth would have been a peasant had she remained in that hut.

Stallybrass and White claim the eighteenth/nineteenth century British bourgeoisie “defined and redefined itself through the exclusions of what it marked out as ‘low’ – dirty, repulsive, noisy and contaminating” (191). I think the male dominated intellectual elite differentiated “high art” from the Gothic through a similar process of “negation and disgust” (evidenced in contemporary reviews) in order to distance themselves from what they saw as populist, appealing to the baser elements in human nature and society and…dangerous.

They may have felt their position threatened by the massive (though covert) popularity of Gothic literature, much as the middle classes felt threatened by the working class culture of Robert Lowe’s “venal masses”. (Wordsworth encapsulated this fear in his carnival scene in the Prelude Book 7 calling what he saw “A Parliament of Monsters”).

In many ways the highbrow critics, who rubbished what they feared and did not understand, were right to feel uncomfortable. Due to technological advances the growth of mass consumption of literature Gothic novels were over printed by mass producing commercial presses. The distribution, via retail and circulating libraries, was also cheap. This led to a rise in independent publishers (like William Lane’s Minerva Press) and what the critics saw as a “rapidly expanding but dangerously undisciplined reading public.” (Watt, 8).  

As a result the Gothic was an empowering force to the less conventionally educated (especially middle-class women as we shall see below).

Thus Gothic transgression is fiction and reality actually pushed the limits of the status quo forcing some degree of ideological and economic change. In Confessions , Hogg knowingly refers to the changes in publishing with a scene in which the impoverished, itinerant Sinner himself is nearly able to print his manuscript with considerable ease. 

Often, then, Gothic transgressions are purposeful and not just a childish lashing out at societal constraints.

Davenport-Hines acknowledges this potential of gothic to act outside of hegemony declaring,” it’s estrangement from the dominant cultural values of every age” allows a transgressive morality that can subvert “ruling authority…[providing] power systems dark antithesis.” (3).

Likewise Patrick McGrath feels the tendency of Gothic towards the transgressive is part and parcel of its potent political potential, “a tale of breakdown could carry with it a precise indictment of the system of economic and racial exploitation that stimulated the breakdown in the first place.” (Gruenberg, 244).

Romantic Gothic, like Romanticism, held a mirror up to British society. Often it reflected what was questionable in that society. We can see this in Melmoth and The Monk with their mob violence or, more subtly, the dangerous advances of science in Frankenstein. Botting points out that the Monster is a political figure, who shows “the debates concerning the French Revolution”; the violent mob is a metaphor for political upheaval and the Monster’s critique of human social and political institutions “represent a radicalism” (Botting, 103).

I feel that Gothic, more so than other genres, is reliant on its specific historical circumstance. Its inception in the eighteenth century and subsequent cyclical resurgences have occurred at times of marked socio-political upheaval, class malcontent and when certain contentious issues (e.g.: feminism, race, sexuality) are pushed to the fore. It is a reaction against apathy and indifference. Gothic art does not re-occur coincidentally, it is an unconscious comment on the circumstances of its environment.

It arises when the art consuming public need forceful stimulation that may well “need to cal on Hell itself”; when the imagery of moral and social decay inherent in Gothic is required by a public fuelled by the death instinct thanatos. In “The Uncanny”(1930)  Freud identified this “death drive” as a fundamental attraction to Gothic. That was during another revival of the form within nearby Weimar Germany. Siegfried Kracauer also suggested that Gothic expressionism in German cinematic art was indicative of a fermenting turbulence prior to the outburst of the death-drive in force: Nazism.

The 1960s - that celebrated time or political and cultural insurgence when sex, drugs and rock and roll could be a serious lifestyle choice - was another era of Gothic revival as are our own fin-de-siecle times. As a civilisation we are losing our way  amidst subtle political coercion, a paranoia cultivated by the commercial elite, a rapacious and destructive fiscal system, a gender role upheaval and widespread, deliberately cultivated, apathy.

The end of the eighteenth century was even more fraught. As a result what Butler says “the collective anxiety” (9) (an aspect of the much discussed “spirit of the age”) was even more likely to produce a Gothic art form. It is worth mentioning that Michel Foucault in his History of Western Sexuality, identifies this era as spontaneously giving rise to S&M. The concerns of which – victimisation, persecution, power relations, sadism, sexuality, internal exploration, translation of internal states to external realities – are primary concerns of the Romantic Gothic.

These themes, particularly the latter, move us out of the realm of the social and into that of the psychological. An area where Gothic comes into its own.

In Melmoth the monk Moncada admits he is what Leopold von Sacher Masoch called “the cringing” / “the bottom”. He says, “Give me something to suffer, to undergo, to submit, and I become at once the hero of submission.” (Maturin, 197). His evil companion is at pains to remind him, “You are in my power”. He even instructs him on becoming an “amateur in suffering”(208) (a phrase that cries out to be adopted into the vocabulary of Masoch). Moncada submissively complies, realising he is caught in “a horrible situation…in which we cling to each other’s hate instead of each other’s love.” Such a comment places the gothic on a psychologically realistic level where humanity is accepted as more prone to unpleasantness than kindliness. This gives it a more developed realism that some of the so-called realist novels like Samuel Richardson’s Pamela.

In an example of the Gothic concentration on the less palatable aspects of humanity we could look at Maturin’s parricide monk who describes how, out of unspecific spite,  he incarcerated two lovers in a dungeon until “they loathed each other” and the man tried to cannibalise the nymph who four days ago he adored. Lewis’s abbess and eponymous villain The Monk embody between them some of the vilest sexual, domineering and violent impulses imaginable.

Obviously these characters are fictitious and not attempts at character reality popular in some other novels of the time. They are embodiments of evil. This is a popular Gothic technique: to externalise internal states or intangible anxieties (such as fear of revolution) within humans, animals, even objects. Often central pairs of doubles were created that could embody internal or thematic oppositions, this was another method of “appropriating the language of...division.” (Sage).

Frankenstein relates to Walton, one of his doubles in the book, that he thought of his monster as “my own spirit let loose from the grave.” He admits his complicity in the murders perpetrated by his double: “I in effect was the true murderer.” (Shelley,140). He and the monster represent different aspect of human nature; in this case one is neither all bad nor the other all good. In Confessions the doubles are more distinct. All the characters of the Editor’s Narrative are antitheses of each other. Rabina, sequestered at the top of the house, is a pious counterpoint to the carnal humanity of the Laird. George is the political, social and spiritual antidote to the austere and repressed Robert Wringhim. On almost every level the religion, psyches, politics and society of Confessions are at odds with each other and these divisions are emblematised in the characters. This Gothic technique can be seen in even sharper detail in later texts like The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr Hyde (Stevenson) or The Picture of Dorian Gray (Wilde).

The double suggests a disassociation of one’s identity. In Melmoth Moncada feels he is being “haunted by my own spectre” (Vol. II, Ch. 11). Later his identity seesaws between a man who’s being lynched, the crowd that’s lynching him and his actual own self. He experiences a “dizzying” (318) level a disassociation. Hogg’s sinner “conceived himself to be two people…my companion [the evil Gilmartin] was one of them and my brother the other.” Gilmartin is an exteriorisation of Robert’s base instincts while his brother represents the goodness of which genetics would suggest he is capable.

Freud discusses the literary double/doppelganger in his essay “The Uncanny” (Sage, 78). By extrapolating his ideas we can see that Romantic Gothic texts benefit amazingly from a psychoanalytic reading. It seems that the writers encapsulated in fiction what took science (viz. psychology) another century to identify.

Psychodynamic constructs such as the Id (the unrepressed carnal hedonism of human nature) fit neatly upon Gothic villains like Frankenstein’s monster, Gilmartin and Ambrosio down through to Mr Hyde.

In books like Pamela the novel was taken to a new level of realism by the creations of characters that acted and felt like “real people”. Romantic Gothic novels, with their doubles and personification, were doing a similar thing in a very different way. Less concerned with verisimilitude they were able to convey psychological states in a way that, in retrospect, is more accurate.

Early gothic tends not to have the psychological authenticity of Romantic Gothic. If someone is incarcerated for any considerable time I(such as Marchesa Mazzini in A Sicilian Romance (1790) ) they do not try to eat each other. Instead they walk our sane and “with collected piety…as neat as a new pin.”(Tompkins, quoted in Sage,90).

This makes them more valid candidates for the essay title . Following the 1789 release of Bastille prisoners the full effect of long term imprisonment was shown to the world and forced art to take one more turn towards hell itself.

Patrick McGrath gives the Gothic its due when he writes, “Before Freud the Gothic had exclusive access to the workings of the disturbed psyche and a monopoly on the depiction of strange and violent behaviour. Freud expanded and systematised that body of knowledge and called it psychoanalysis.” (Gruenberg, 156).

Gothic novels have also enriched and been enriched by a dialogue with other schools of critical interpretation.  Gothic was of tremendous importance in terms of gender, then as now. The inculcation of feminist criticism has unveiled this.

The majority readership of the Gothic novel was female, as were many of its key practitioners. This created a dialogic gendered discourse which allowed the genre to become a zone where the exploration of specifically female issues could occur.

In Otranto and other antecedents to the later Gothic, the female characters are objectified and exist mainly as victims  in relation to a male protagonist’s power. In the tales of  “Radcliffe and her successors the reader shares a female perspective; we see hero and villain alike as relative to her.” (Gruenberg, 122).  

Anne Williams, in her essay “Edifying Narratives” (Gruenberg, ed.) maintains that Anne Radcliffe was “the first novelist [my itals.]to break away from a centuries old masculine ‘I’” (Gruenberg) and replace it with a credible independent female first person narrator. The female readership no longer had to compromise their gender subject position. They did not have to vicariously subdue the novel’s female characters (occupying the standard male position)  or have to empathise with ineffectual female victims of male  brutality. “The literary artist was no longer necessarily a ‘man speaking to men’(to use Wordsworth’s phrase); she may well be a ‘a woman speaking to women’.” (Gruenberg, 134)

This eruption of literary feminisation coincided with a major outbreak of early political feminism. At this time many working class women were becoming involved in Trade Unions and socialist politics  (Beddoe). “Women were active long before suffrage was achieved.” (Beddoe, 93).

It is worth remembering that Mary Shelley’s mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, was a prominent early feminist  especially as Frankenstein’s monster has been translated as a symbol of disenfranchised women (Botting).

Frankenstein can also be seen as a birth narrative. The monster, like the enlightenment concept of a tabula rasa, was created by (born unto) Frankenstein with a “heart susceptible of love and sympathy.” (Shelley). He proves his ability to learn but his abandonment by his sole male parent leads to feelings “wrenched by misery to vice and hatred.” This could be a mother’s warning about the dangers of birthing a child from reason rather than from love. Such rejection leads to social dislocation and, ultimately, malevolence. Like so much in Frankenstein this theme is as pertinent, if not more so, today. This alone is enough to raise the novel above a unimportant sensationalist exploitation of “transgression and taboo.”

In Literary Women Ellen Moers suggest Mary Shelley used the conventions of the Gothic to “express [a] sense of women’s experience in their culture.” (Gruenberg, ed.) If one examines Shelley’s difficult maternal experiences and lack of complete acceptance into the literary and political spheres occupied by her husband and father, Frankenstein and the experiences of its monster become more resonant. It is conceivably an attempt to make sense of the irrational injustices of her life, to “express a sense” of her “woman’s experience.”

It seems that an important legacy of the Gothic is that of female empowerment within both a literary tradition and as financially and intellectually viable literary consumers. So, amongst other things, I think it is a vital genre in the historical study of gender politics and the literary study of feminism.

Romantic Gothic has a moral agenda too. Some contemporaneous critics felt it promoted violence and bad behaviour, just like some observers today feel film and television promote violence and bad behaviour. I think that the sublime catharsis (to paraphrase Edmund Burke), that Gothic achieves acts to discourage acts of immorality. The moral transgressions in Gothic seemed to highlight the value of the boundaries crossed. Readers, although grimly fascinated by Ambrosio’s atrocities or Frankenstein’s Promethean pursuits, are not meant to feel attracted but repulsed by such wrongdoing. Especially considering the respective ends of the pair. Patrick McGrath’s ideal that by representing a (moral) breakdown “a tale…could carry with it an indictment [of that which] stimulated the breakdown in the first place.”

Walpole, in his preface to Otranto, claims to have portrayed a “more useful moral”,  Radcliffe’s work was all somewhat didactic and even the minor Gothicist Clara Reeve subtitled her most famous work(The Old English Baron, 1777) “The Champion of Virtue.” (Gruenberg, 154-9). This moral dimension to the Gothic continues in the Romantic period. Frankenstein has some clear lessons that echo eerily down the years (some of which, regarding the current controversies around genetic engineering, Shelley could not have foreseen). Behind Melmoth’s cynical expansions (and the author’s cynical preface claiming his major motivation for writing was cash) one can see the clergyman Maturin’s moral sermonising.

Few would describe the wider Romantic movement altogether in as critical a way as the author of this essay’s title. Yet it cannot be denied that Gothic literature of the Romantic period used many of Romanticism’s identifying motifs, styles and themes often to greater effect than the canonical texts.

Pathetic Fallacy was a favourite tool of the Romantics and is well used in the better Gothic novels and poems. Ruined castles can be indicators of mental states, reminders of the past, indicators of Walpole's messages that the past “sins of the fathers” can haunt the present. Ancient abodes and objects can connote unwholesome inherited traditions, family secrets even the structures of political systems and familial hierarchies. Like our minds, these castles are filled with hidden chambers which need unlocking and exorcising.

It is no accident that the final scenes of The Monk involve the main characters descending into the forbidden tomb under the St Clare convent. This tomb, locate of various travesties and injustices, is representative of the interdicted regions of the soul. It is here where the characters must go to confront their deep-seated impulses and hopefully return more cohesive, less disturbed, individuals.

In Otranto the castle is at first just an aged castle but, as we discover more family secrets, it takes on an aspect of dread, as if it is cursed by its ancestry. In de Sade’s 120 Days of Sodom what is first a “picturesque chateau” (Sade, 77) changes to a physically illogical labyrinthe beehive of horror “nearer Belsen or Dachau” than holiday retreat (Hines 176).

Davenport-Hines says of Frankenstein, “It is the first novel in which the gothic effects of castles, mountains, storms and violence have any ambitious symbolism.” [My itals.] (Along with Anne Radcliffe that’s two literary first;  both by women, both in the Gothic - not bad for a genre of just transgression and taboo!).

The wider Romantic movement also sees nature as an organic entity analogous with the human mind, almost like Gaia theory which rests on similar concepts.

The Norton Anthology Volume II states “Romantic poets habitually endow the landscape with human life, passion and nature” (9). The book cites Tintern Abbey as an example, (and if Wordsworth was doing it we know it’s got to be OK). One intention of Romanticism was to elevate human consciousness through language, emotional and imaginative release and “aligning humanity” with the “perfection of nature” (Wu, xvii). The Romantic Gothic attempts much the same connection with the sublime enlisting the help of cathartic “terror” to achieve this end.

Gothic shares Romanticism’s interests in the limits of human experience and imagination. The Gothic uses intensified emotion, imagination and terror (in the Burkean sense) to accomplish a heightening of the senses.

Walpole even states this as his intention with Otranto. In the preface he writes that he sought “a liberation of Imagination against the damming up by a strict adherence to common life” (quoted in Hume, 283). An aim which has permeated the Gothic up to the present day.

There is  “an obsessive fascination with the power of the imagination and psychic experience” (Sedgwick, 17). This manifests itself in a clear shift away from the preceding artistic mode of neo-classicism, away from the rational science and philosophy of Newton and Locke and towards the boundaries of the known. When you are on the edge of knowledge transgression can only bring revelation.

The legendary figures popular with the Romantics are also used in Gothic, especially that of the fiercely individual non-conformist; a descendant of Milton’s Satan. This construct can be seen exactly in Byron’s Manfred. The legend of Faust and the Wandering Jew -  the overreacher and the damned - also weigh heavily on the Romantic imagination. By their very nature these could safely be classed as somewhat Gothic personages so it’s no surprise to see them appearing in Gothic literature. Ambrosio makes a sort of Faustian pact releasing his lusts in return for his consecration while Melmoth’s sale of his soul results in him becoming an archetypal “wandering Jew”.

A less demoniac romantic hero is Prometheus who, according, to Greek legend, invoked the displeasure of Zeus by creating man from clay and then stealing fire for him to keep his feet warm. Prometheus is another overreached but this time a more altruistic one. His most famous Gothic incarnation is as Frankenstein…the Modern Prometheus. To Victor “life and death [are] ideal bounds which I should break through.” (Shelley, 47) but his toils are not for the sake of arrogance or riches sakes but for the benefit of mankind (or so he tells himself).

Romanticism concentrates on the outsider and the outcast. This shift of attention to the marginalised is a major feature which of most – if not all - Gothic. The (anti)heroes, for whatever reason, are outcasts. As Hume states, “In contradistinction to the realist novel of manners…Gothic and Romantic writing usually led the reader to consider internal processes and reaction. The one sort of writing is basically social in its concern, the other essentially individual.” It is the emphasis on the individual that marks out Romanticism and the Gothic.

Hume also identified another unifying aspect of “Gothic and Romantic writing: they spring alike from a recognition of the insufficiency of reason or religious faith to make comprehensible the complexities of life.” This suggests that Gothic, rather that using recourse to the supernatural as escapism, was exploring avenues of possibility using the available language and allegories of the time. This rings even more true if we bear in mind that the Romantic period saw a resurgence of interest in the pagan and occult as a means of grafting sense on life’s disorder (Butler, 9).

So assuming that Romanticism is a movement of profound worth and accepting that the Gothic is inextricable intertwined with it, logic dictates that we must invest some of that profound worth of the former into the latter.

Admittedly there are a great many bad Gothic novels, as parodied by Jane Austen in  Northanger Abbey. The twentieth century gothic writer HP Lovecraft feels “Northanger Abbey was no means an unmerited rebuke…but it would be difficult to find a false note in” Frankenstein or Melmoth the Wanderer (Lovecraft, 33). Davenport-Hines agrees that, “most Gothic output has been soap-operatic” with its taboo shocks and facile emotional thrills. However when Gothic gets it right it can be transcendent, cathartic great art. All Gothic literature, especially that of the Romantic period, cannot fairly be tarred with same brush.

The Romantic Gothic’s prevalence among newly intellectually enfranchised women was an enabling force. I have mentioned Anne Radcliffe heralding a new, less phallocentric literary idiom. Not only were women empowered but I have noted how also the very nature of production of Gothic books was transgressive, and empowering to the less educated because of it.

We have seen that there is evidence and contemporary academic support to suggest that Romantic Gothic, both alone and as a facet of its parent movement, has had a massive political and social import. It was able to supply a voice strong enough to incorporate the post-1789 residual revolutionary shocks. The word monster derives from the Latin “montrer” – to show, and the monsters of Gothic are demonstrative of certain states and ideas that could not be grasped in many other ways at the time.

Also I have mentioned another legacy of the Gothic is its critical heritage. New ways of reading texts have exploded the meanings of the genre into a goldmine of interpretative possibilities. Feminism and psychoanalysis – the two strands I have mentioned in this essay – have helped us to realist that, consciously or unconsciously, Romantic Gothic can be of great philosophical validity.

The practitioners of the form certainly thought more of their work than just “transgression or taboo”. Walpole, according to Butler, saw Otranto as a “literary experiment” (Butler, 20). Walpole himself stated his purpose was to release the novel from imaginative fetters, He wrote, in his preface to the second edition, “the great resources of fancy have been dammed up by a strict adherence to common life” [paraphrase]. The 1818 Preface to Frankenstein claimed the novel was not just a “weaving of supernatural terrors” not a “mere tale of spectres or enchantment” but a delineation of “human passions more comprehensive and commanding than any which the ordinary relations of existing events can yield.”

Cornwell says of Melmoth “it was a roar of outrage against the excesses and trappings of Catholicism” (a lot of Gothic output in various media had an anti-Catholic subtext).

Even if a writer initially set out only to shock and represent transgression and taboo (after all Shelley and Lewis were both only “rebellious” teens when they penned their horrors) usually the end result is a far more worthwhile text or at least a contribution to what is in toto a far more complex corpus of generic work. One of the novels Jane Austen implied was tripe in Northanger Abbey was called by Devendra Varma, author of The Gothic Flame, “ a masterpiece” (Punter, 115).

Although widely reviled at the time, even by those Romantics who extolled the used of the supernatural in fiction (like Coleridge quoted in Hume 284), the Gothic is far better known to the majority of people than the more canonical works revered in erudite circles. We cannot glibly dismiss a genre that gave rise to some of the most enduring images of western popular culture such as the notion of a Frankenstein monster or Dracula. These creations have saturated our literature, cinema, music and art for decades.

On a less universal [Pictures] note we need only look at the reams and reams of scholarly criticism relating to the Gothic to see that it is enormously important… If for nothing else, because it gives academics something to do.

G.Gulati                                                                 Summer 2000

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