James Ward, Gordale Scar, 1814, London, Tate Gallery Raffaella Mannori classi 5° 2015-2016

James Ward, Gordale Scar, 1814, London, Tate Gallery

Raffaella Mannori classi 5° 2015-2016

James Ward, Gordale Scar, 1814, London, Tate Gallery


THE GOTHICSETTIN

G

FIRST GOTHIC AUTHORS

The language

THE ORIGIN OF THE NAME

VICTORIAN GOTHIC

CHARACTERS

It came to popularity at the end of the 18th century

The adjective ‘Gothic’three connotations

Medieval, linked to the architecture

of the 12th-14th centuries

Irregular, barbarous, opposed to Classicism

Wild, supernatural,in the sense of

mysterious

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The 18th-century society

Industrial exploitation•Destruction of the single human being.

•Man as a slave to forces he could

•not control.

•Gothic symbols as denunciation of social

problems.

The ‘sublime’

• As a celebration of terror.

• As a rejection of constraints and

limits.

• As exploration of forbidden areas.

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Great importance given to terror, characterised by obscurity and uncertainty, and horror, caused by evil and atrocity.

Night & Darkness, necessary ingredients for the mysterious, gloomy and oppressive atmosphere.

ANCIENT SETTINGS , like isolated castles, mysterious abbeys and convents.


3. The Gothic setting

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Characters dominated by exaggerated reactions in front of mysterious situations or events.

Supernatural beings: vampires, monsters and ghosts.

Sensitive heroes: they save heroines. Heroines dominated by exaggerated

passions and by fear of imprisonment, rape and personal violation , stricken by unreal terrors and persecuted by the villains

VILLAINS = Satanic, terrifying male characters, victims of their negative impulses

Henry Fuseli (Johann Heinrich Füssli), The Nightmare, 1781, Goethe Museum,

Frankfurt


Semantic areas Words

Mystery enchantment, ghost, haunted, infernal, magic, secret, spectre, vision

Fear / Terror / Sorrow

agony, anguish, apprehensions, despair, dread, fearing, frightened, hopeless, horror, melancholy, miserable, panic, sadly, scared, shrieks, sorrow, tears, terror, unhappy, wretched

Hasteanxious, breathless, frantic, hastily, impatient, running, suddenly

Anger anger, enraged, furious, rage, resentment, wrath

Largeness enormous, gigantic, large, tremendous, vast

Gothic writers chose vocabulary that referred to emotions and feelings, capable of evoking anxiety, fear or horror.

The Gothic novel


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Horace Walpole The Castle of Otranto (1764)

Ann Radcliffe The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794)

Matthew Lewis The Monk (1796) Mary Shelley Frankenstein (1818)


Matthew Lewis The Monk (1796) The story concerns Ambrosio - a pious, well-respected monk in Spain - and his

violent downfall. He is undone by carnal lust for his pupil, a woman disguised as a monk (Matilda), who tempts him to transgress, and, once satisfied by her, is overcome with desire for the innocent Antonia.

Using magic spells Matilda aids him in seducing Antonia, whom he later rapes and kills. Matilda is eventually revealed as an instrument of Satan in female form, who has orchestrated Ambrosio's downfall from the start.

In the middle of telling this story Lewis frequently makes further digressions, which serve to heighten the Gothic atmosphere of the tale. A lengthy story about a "Bleeding Nun" is told and a second romance, between Lorenzo and Antonia, also gives way to a tale of Lorenzo's sister being tortured by hypocritical nuns . Eventually, the story catches back up with Ambrosio, and in several pages of impassioned prose, Ambrosio is delivered into the hands of the Inquisition; he escapes by selling his soul to the devil for his deliverance from the death sentence which awaits him. The story ends with the devil preventing Ambrosio's attempted final repentance, and the sinful monk's prolonged torturous death. Ambrosio finds out by the devil that the woman that he had raped and killed, Antonia, was indeed his sister.


Horace Walpole The Castle of Otranto (1764) The Castle of Otranto tells the story of Manfred, lord of the castle, and his family. The book begins on the wedding-day of his sickly son Conrad and princess Isabella. Shortly before the wedding, however, Conrad is crushed to death by a gigantic helmet that falls on him from above. This inexplicable event is particularly ominous in light of an ancient prophecy . Manfred, terrified that Conrad's death signals the beginning of the end for his line, resolves to avert destruction by marrying Isabella himself while divorcing his current wife Hippolita, who he feels has failed to bear him a proper heir. However, Manfred's attempts at a second union are disrupted by a series of supernatural events involving the appearance of numerous oversized artifacts and body-parts as well as the arrival of the true prince, Theodore of Falconara


The influence of Byronic Romanticism is also apparent in the work of the Brontë sisters.

Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights (1847) transports the Gothic to the forbidding Yorkshire Moors and features ghostly apparitions and a Byronic hero in the person of the demonic Heathcliff whilst Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre (1847) adds the madwoman in the attic to the cast of gothic fiction. The Brontës' fiction is seen by some feminist critics as prime examples of Female Gothic, exploring woman's entrapment within domestic space and subjection to patriarchal authority and the transgressive and dangerous attempts to subvert and escape such restriction. Charlotte's Jane Eyre and Emily's Cathy are both examples of female protagonists in such a role.

The 1880s, saw the revival of the Gothic as a powerful literary form allied to "fin de siecle" decadence.Classic works of this Urban Gothic include Robert Louis Stevenson's Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886), Oscar Wilde'sThe Picture of Dorian Gray (1891).The most famous gothic villain ever, Count Dracula was created by Bram Stoker in his novel Dracula (1897). Stoker's book also established Transylvania and Eastern Europe as the locus classicus of the Gothic -


Documents

James Ward, Gordale Scar, 1814, London, Tate Gallery Raffaella Mannori classi 5° 2015-2016