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Readership and Historical Context
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Gothic Literature
In this course, Professor John McRae (University of Nottingham) explores the history of the Gothic novel, beginning with Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto, and finishing with the literature (and films) of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries that have been influenced by the Gothic, including Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca and Angela Carter’s A Bloody Chamber. Along the way, we will explore some of the most important novels in the English language, including: Frankenstein, Wuthering Heights, Jane Eyre, Dr Jekyll & Mr Hyde, and the Picture of Dorian Gray.
Readership and Historical Context
In this module, we think about the origins of the word ‘gothic’ itself, the original readership for the earliest gothic novels, and what is was about eighteenth-century England that gave rise to novels such as Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764) and Matthew Lewis’ The Monk (1796)
I'm John McRae and we're talking about the Gothic novel. Now there's a term for you,
00:00:03the Gothic novel. What does it actually mean? There are lots and lots of different
00:00:10kinds of Gothic novels, transformations of the Gothic novel, and we're going to see
00:00:15all the way through from the beginnings in the late 18th century until modern times,
00:00:20how these three words "the Gothic novel" have been played around with,
00:00:26adapted, transformed and modernised. The first Gothic novel is the The Castle of
00:00:32Otranto, that's the correct pronunciation, by Walpole, which was published in 1764.
00:00:38And he himself called it, in the subtitle, "A Gothic Story." Where did he get that
00:00:46concept? Because that concept has stuck, it's remained in use to this day,
00:00:53even things like Hunger Games and Twilight have elements of Gothic in them.
00:00:59It's a term that has been adapted, modified, improved and criticised all the
00:01:06way through its history. Walpol used the term "Gothic" because like many of the
00:01:14novels that followed his, it goes back to the medieval and to a style of
00:01:23architecture, which then was revived as a result of the success of the Gothic novel,
00:01:29in what is called "The Gothic revival" and things like the Houses of Parliament in
00:01:34London are considered, in some ways, to be part of a Gothic revival in architecture.
00:01:38So this medieval element is important. It's a harking back to a time even before
00:01:43the renaissance, where values were different, where things weren't modern.
00:01:52The 18th century saw itself as a modern and
00:02:00improving age. We're at the beginning of
00:02:04the Industrial Revolution, we're at the beginning of the Agrarian Revolution.
00:02:07And so, as often happens in moments of progress, there is a harking back to older
00:02:13times and older values. A sort of re-writing of history, if you like.
00:02:19And this presages the re-writing of history, which is going to happen in the
00:02:25novel, about 50 or 60 years after Walpol, when Walter Scott starts re-writing the
00:02:30history, especially of medieval England. And writing the history that will become
00:02:37what the Victorians see as the proper history of how the country came to be what
00:02:44it was. Now, Walpol is doing something different, as are the other writers who
00:02:50followed him, people like William Beckford and Ann Radcliffe. They are using the
00:02:57imagination to create a new kind of frisson, a thrill, something scary.
00:03:04But they're harking back to a tradition which can be found everywhere in
00:03:12literature. In English, you can find it in Beowulf, you can find it in Chaucer.
00:03:18And if you think about Shakespeare, what about the witches in Macbeth?
00:03:23The whole idea of a castle, and spookiness, and ghosts. It's everywhere in
00:03:27Renaissance and Jacobean drama. So the Gothic isn't new when the Gothic novel
00:03:33starts up, it is a rediscovery, a reinvention, a playing around with
00:03:40conventions which then develop into the horror sub-genre. And as a sub-genre,
00:03:46it flourishes in these years between the 1760s and 1800. It becomes very popular.
00:03:54The readership of the Gothic novel, in its initial stages, was female.
00:04:03There was a new demographic for the novel. The first major novels written by people
00:04:10like Aphra Behn and Daniel Defoe, and Jonathan Swift, go back to the beginning
00:04:18of the 18th century. The 1720s is a great period for the novels of Defoe and Swift,
00:04:25for example. And then after the Theatres Act of 1737, drama kind of disappeared as
00:04:31a popular genre, and Henry Fielding was one of the fathers of the novel,
00:04:39had been a dramatist, he turned his hand to the novel. Samuel Richardson wrote
00:04:44novels like Clarissa. The readership for these novels was a new,
00:04:49middle-class, young woman. Richardson's novels were kind of telling young women
00:04:56how to behave, what the correct and acceptable mode of behaviour was.
00:05:03Now that's going to be a key word, "acceptable," because, not surprisingly,
00:05:10many female readers reacted against the patriarchal prescription of how to behave
00:05:16in the modern middle-class world of post-revolutionary England.
00:05:26You see, that's another important concept. We have to go back in time,
00:05:33even before Defoe and Richardson. Because in 1649 the worst possible thing that
00:05:37could have happened to Britain, happened. The revolution killed the king.
00:05:45This is something that Shakespeare had predicted 50 years before in Hamlet.
00:05:52What happens when you kill a king? It's one of the most threatening moments in all
00:05:58of British history. And after Oliver Cromwell died, and his son took over the
00:06:04Common Wealth, they realised there was another dynasty looming,
00:06:12and they quickly brought back the king, and it was called "The Restoration."
00:06:18It wasn't really a restoration, it was a replacement of political systems.
00:06:22But after The Restoration, in 1660, it became important, symbolically,
00:06:27to do the same to Cromwell as they... Cromwell had done to King Charles I.
00:06:36His body was dug up and it was beheaded. Now, if you know anything at all about the
00:06:44Gothic novel, that is a horribly Gothic image. The digging up of bodies and then
00:06:50beheading, a very gothic start to what is called "The Restoration."
00:06:57And that society, from 1660 onwards, all the way through the Victorian Era and into
00:07:04the 20th century, in many ways, was so scared of any other possible revolution,
00:07:12that the main thrust, the main political thrust of all literary production,
00:07:20was not to rock the boat. To maintain the status quo. And anybody who did rock the
00:07:26boat, like, for example Jonathon Swift, with the highly satirical and highly
00:07:34political novel, Gulliver's Travels, was kind of side-lined. It was turned into a
00:07:39kiddies story, in order to be unthreatening. One of the main features of
00:07:46the literature of the Augustan Age, is that it be rational, unemotional,
00:07:52stable, because that was the kind of political reality that society wanted.
00:07:59Well the Gothic novel comes along and shakes that to the core,
00:08:07because what the Gothic novel appeals to is sensationalism. The imagination,
00:08:13the sublime, the exaggerated, the transgressive. It's going beyond the
00:08:21societal norms of a patriarchal society. It is exploring realms of the imagination
00:08:28which had been forbidden, especially to women. Because women in that society were
00:08:36seen, of course, as inferior to men, of course. The phrase "the angel in the
00:08:44house" was coined by Coventry Patmore in the Victorian Era to describe the ideal
00:08:53role of women in a patriarchal society. Well, I want to suggest that the initial
00:08:58readers of the Gothic novel did not subscribe to that at all. They were
00:09:05wanting to break away, and the way they could break away was through the
00:09:11imagination. Through reading about women doing dangerous things,
00:09:16women exploring areas where women weren't meant to go. The traditional image we have
00:09:22of the Gothic heroin is an innocent, virginal young lady lost in a castle or a
00:09:29creepy building, and going down the corridor with her candle, and the doors
00:09:37creaking, and then the candle blows out. What does she do? She goes on.
00:09:43This is thrilling to the reader, this is risky to the reader, because these readers
00:09:51were readers who were familiar with the greatest text of the time,
00:09:57Paradise Lost by John Milton, published six years after The Restoration,
00:10:02where Eve had been the cause of the fall of mankind. Eve had succumbed to the
00:10:08blandishments of Satan, the Devil, and taken the apple, eaten from the Tree of
00:10:18Knowledge. If she hadn't done that, Adam and Eve would have been stuck in the
00:10:24garden of Eden forever. Humanity would never have made any progress towards the
00:10:28modern world. Now, Milton's text, Paradise Lost, is nowadays read as an expression of
00:10:33freedom of choice. Free will. In the period we're talking about,
00:10:41the late 17th and 18th centuries, however, it was read as an official Christian text,
00:10:50and women were seen as inferior. Women had misbehaved, "Of man's first disobedience,"
00:10:57Milton talks. And this disobedience is, I want to suggest, a huge part of the
00:11:06attraction of the Gothic novel in its early stages, for the target readership,
00:11:14who are women. It's quite remarkable that many of the earliest writers of the Gothic
00:11:20novel were either gay men or they were women. Walpol, William Beckford who wrote
00:11:27Vathek, Matthew Lewis who wrote The Monk, Charles Maturin who wrote Melmoth the
00:11:35Wanderer. And that novel, Melmoth the Wanderer by Charles Maturin,
00:11:40published in 1814, fast-forwards us to Oscar Wilde at the end of the 19th
00:11:44century, who took the name of the hero of that novel, Sebastian Melmoth,
00:11:50as his new identity when he was released from prison after serving his term at the
00:11:55end of the 19th century. He became "the wandering outsider." The readership,
00:12:01therefore, of the early Gothic novels, was identifying with outsiders.
00:12:09The readership, as I said, was largely female. But, when we begin to look at
00:12:16other elements of the novel, in the Gothic framework, we will see many other elements
00:12:21coming in to bear.
00:12:28
Cite this Lecture
APA style
McRae, J. (2018, August 15). Gothic Literature - Readership and Historical Context [Video]. MASSOLIT. https://massolit.io/courses/gothic-literature-mcrae/fin-de-siecle
MLA style
McRae, J. "Gothic Literature – Readership and Historical Context." MASSOLIT, uploaded by MASSOLIT, 15 Aug 2018, https://massolit.io/courses/gothic-literature-mcrae/fin-de-siecle