Gothic Literature Questions
Bring on the tough stuff. There's not just one right answer.
- If Gothic Literature was really so innovative, and, well, sublime, what differentiates it from the Romantics beyond its focus on the creepy-crawly?
- Reason, the scientific method, and natural laws that ordered the universe were touted by nearly every political and philosophical thinker at this time. Collectively, this was called the Enlightenment. How did Gothic writers deal with this focus on a world that could be understood, organized, and codified? How could insisting on the involvement of supernatural forces in our daily lives counteract claims that the world was a rational place?
- Identity, self, feelings, personal experience, the individual, isolation—all were obsessions for Gothic writers. Somewhere along the way to figuring out what made individuals tick, they stumbled upon a literary trope that doubles the individual: The Picture of Dorian Gray, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, The Woman in White, Wuthering Heights, and many others contain doppelgangers. Does the intense focus on the individual force this doubling? Is the doubling meant simply as a comparison in order to better understand the individual? Is the pairing of two characters meant to muddy our judgment? More importantly, does the doubling imply that focus on the individual reverts back to a need for community? Does the isolation individual need a friend, but only has the self? Is this a one is the loneliest number, but two can be as bad situation?
- Okay, so you're sitting in your office at the embassy in Holland, there's nothing to do, all your friends are bitter that they had to run for their lives from all the crazy political, revolutionary stuff in France, and you're just a nineteen-year-old learning how to be a diplomat. You are bored out of your mind and decide to write the next great Gothic novel. But you could write anything: epic poetry, a play, a novel that's note about how everyone gets murdered. Yet you choose the most violent themes you can think of and run with it. Why? Is there something about Gothicism that allows people to deal with the frustrations, uncertainty, difficulty, fear, and yes, even incredible violence in their own lives?
- Yes, Gothic writers seemed nostalgic for a Medieval world they didn't fully understand, but what they imagined about the horrors of the Spanish Inquisition or public physical punishments might not have been far off from what they were experiencing in their own time. After all, when Matthew Gregory Lewis published The Monk in 1818, Europe had already experienced The Reign of Terror only a few decades before. His novel was a hit. How much of their own lives and their own recent history do you think readers found in Gothic literature?