The Role of Fear and Obsession on Gothic Literature. It seems within these texts that a sense of Gothic, with regard to the influence and obsession of the characters, comes not so much from the conventional fear of the supernatural and the mystical but m

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Ryan Page

“There was something terribly enthralling in the exercise of influence”. The influence of fear and the power of human obsession are often central ideas within the Gothic and more important to Gothic works than the supernatural or grotesque.

Gothicism itself is a branch of Romanticism, which twists the idea of feeling into slightly more morbid and macabre emotions of fear and a dead, twisted and medieval past as well as losing the early Romantic sense of a moral purpose. The quotation above, taken from Oscar Wilde’s novel The Picture of Dorian Gray, introduces some of the key ideas which seem to run prevalently throughout Gothic works of fiction and art. It seems undeniable that influence and obsession are able to create, manipulate and dominate the emotions of fear and dread which often characterise the Gothic. 

Edmund Burke stated that: ‘No passion so effectually robs the minds of all its powers of acting and reasoning as fear’. It seems that within the development of the Gothic, fear plays a ubiquitous role. Influence can be prevalent in inciting fear, the influence of a figure or an atmosphere and other less tangible elements of the work can be key factors which hold a certain influence over the individual. However, fear in itself is often seen to present its own influence and it is this tantalizing inexplicable mystery of fear which so often develops and envelopes a character with obsession to retain truth and logic. Within Susan Hill’s novel, The Woman in Black, the main character Arthur Kipps demonstrates an obvious fear of the woman in black and the supernatural elements of her presence and appearance - ‘…suffering from some terrible wasting disease…only the thinnest layer of flesh was tautly stretched and strained across her bones’- are certainly expressed vividly throughout and contribute largely to the influence which she increasingly has on not only Kipps but also the villagers. The use of heavy adjectival phrases in describing the woman, the idea of ‘deepest black’, the woman described as ‘pathetically wasted…pale and gaunt with disease’ and the alliterative skin ‘stretched and strained’, give an initially comprehensive description of the woman which not only creates fear but also develops it steadily and makes it feel ubiquitous and unavoidable, as though every element of her is grotesque. Within the pre-1948 setting of the novel the idea of wasting, particularly referring to Tuberculosis, would have had a particularly chilling effect as the disease would have been the cause of many deaths and, before the introduction of the NHS, the lack of readily available health care would have made the disease a constant source of fear. However, it could also be argued that it is not only the descriptions of the woman which perpetuate a sense of fear and influence both the characters and the reader, indeed Hill’s descriptions of the woman are often significantly sparse. It seems within this text that the influence of fear is born from the idea of the mysterious and the unexplored rather than the grotesque and it is the influence of the ‘unknown’ which shapes fear and creates a sense of the Gothic. The idea of a local and tightly-knit community who all share and perpetuate a sense of secrecy links strongly with the idea of this as a Gothic text – Hill here uses the idea of isolation and unfamiliarity to enhance the idea that Kipps is an outsider and to create the mystery and silence which only fuels the influence of fear upon him: ‘Mr Jerome stopped dead. He was staring at me…Mr. Jerome looked frozen, pale, his throat moving as if he were unable to utter’. Mr Jerome’s reaction as well as the hotel landlord’s ‘…the name had stirred some strong emotion in him, all signs of which he endeavoured to suppress at once’, are representative of the general reaction towards not only the woman but anything associated with her and so clearly another manifestation of her influence over them.

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This idea of fear being sparked and fuelled by a sense of mystery is certainly reflected within Wordsworth’s poem, ‘The Thorn’. Within this poem, from his collection of Lyrical Ballads, strong links can be made with The Woman in Black. The woman within the poem, Martha Ray, is a figure to be feared in the same way as the woman in black not as a result of her as a character but of the mysteries which envelope her. The whole poem is presented as a narrator’s account of what he has seen and the rumours which he has heard about ...

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