The Use of Gothic in Literature in the late 18th and early 19th Centuries
The term ‘Gothic’ in Architecture refers to a revival of a medieval art that was in fashion in Britain from the early eighteenth to the late nineteenth century. Such cultural reforms of a fairly fantasized edition of the past together with a sense of the ‘barbaric’ Germanic tribes offered a framework for the surfacing of Gothic as a literary genre. The development of a Gothic literary style was given new momentum in the mid-eighteenth century with the materialization of Enlightenment beliefs that exalted the virtues of rationality. Such ideas were challenged in Britain by the Romantics at the end of the 18th century, who asserted that the complexity of human experience could not be explained by an inhuman rationalism. For them, the inner worlds of the emotions and the imagination were greater than the claims of, for instance, natural philosophy.
The Gothic is at one level closely related to these Romantic considerations, and poets such as Coleridge, Keats, Byron and Shelley at various times used the Gothic to investigate, at different levels of explicitness, the role played by the irrational in criticizing quasi-rationalistic accounts of human experience. Intellectual support was given to this view by philosophies which explored the limits of thought and feeling. Edmund Burke’s A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origins of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757) suggested that the sublime (a major Romantic idea) was related to feelings of terror (rather than with benevolence which was a characteristic of some other models of sublimity) (Smith 2007).
Burke argued that transgression and terrifying feelings (associated with mainly imaginary pending violent death) were the most powerful forces that people were subjected to and hence the most sublime. Immanuel Kant’s more meticulously philosophical account of the sublime in The Critique of Judgement (1790) claimed that there was a difference between phenomena (a world of objects) and noumena (a world of ideas), in an examination of the relationship between the mind and the external world. For Kant, the sublime portrayed the limits of subjective experience, and this emphasis on introspection privileges thought and understanding above certain Enlightenment ideas about the presence of an independent or objective reality that can be rationally comprehended.
Nevertheless, even though the Gothic often shared in such anti-Enlightenment notions (because it focused on thoughts and feelings), it is vital to recognize that the early Gothic appeared to be highly mechanical, dependent on particular settings, such as castles, monasteries, and ruins, and with characters, such as aristocrats, monks, and nuns who, superficially, appeared to be identical from one novel to another. However, such stories are not as stereotyped as they appear to be, and it is essential to look beyond such narrative props to take into consideration the anti-Enlightenment impulses and related themes and issues which are fundamental to the gothic (Smith 2007).
Another important element in any assessment of a Gothic text is its representation of evil. The demonization of particular types of behaviour made noticeable the clandestine political views of a text. This is perhaps not surprising because the 1790s were an era in which the fears of, or interest in revolutionary ideas, exemplified by their practical implementation by the French Revolution, profoundly influenced the British Gothic.
The relationship between the Terror in France (the term used to refer to the mass executions, which included many of the first generation of revolutionary leaders) and literary versions of Terror can, for instance, expose the moral outlooks and political sympathies of specific writers. Nevertheless, it is necessary to approach such apparent clarity with circumspection. One of the key terms in the Gothic is that of ambivalence because the Gothic so often appeared to delight in transgression (Smith 2007).
The Gothic is also a form which is generated in different genres as well as national and social contexts. The American gothic tradition, for instance, reveals particular concerns about race which are closely tied to issues of slavery and how it shaped a black identity politics which emerged in the post-Civil War period. America, unlike Britain, had a revolution (1775-6, although fighting with Britain continued until 1781) and was thus free of the images of threatened political turmoil that coloured a strand of late eighteenth-century British Gothic writing. In Germany the emergence of the ‘shudder novel’ in the late 18th century had its origins in a German Romantic tradition which included Schiller and Goethe.
The shudder novel was a form which influenced the Gothic from other nations, and this illustrates how nationally specific manifestations of the Gothic played a role in shaping the aesthetic considerations of the Gothic in other countries. The Gothic also encompassed different forms, including drama, poetry, the novel, the novella, and the short story, and in the 20th century it was taken up by the radio, film, and television.
The roots of the British Gothic can be found in the mid-18th century Graveyard Poetry of Collins, Young, Blair, and Gray, a quite different point of origin from that of the German shudder novel. In addition, Gothic theatre’s heyday in Britain coincided with the popularity of the Gothic novel, approximately from 1780s to the 1820s, whereas in France Gothic drama was staged at the infamous Grand Guignol theatre in Paris from 1897 until its closure in 1962.
Different nations therefore produced different types of Gothic that developed and fed into other Gothic forms which proliferated in one place but seemingly died out in another. Despite the national, formal, and genetic mutations of the Gothic, it is possible to identify certain persistent features which include a distinctive aesthetic. Representations of ruins, castles, monasteries, and forms of monstrosity, and images of insanity, transgression, the supernatural, and excess, all typically characterise the gothic (Smith 2007).
By all accounts, the first gothic novel was Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto, which was published in 1764. The novel is about a cursed family and eerie events in spooky castles and giant body parts that appear out of nowhere. And everyone dies. The rise of the public’s interest in Gothic literature also paralleled, perhaps even fuelled, a rise in Europe’s interest in its historical past (as national identities came together) and reading became common.
This was especially true during the early years of the Industrial Revolution (1750). Gothic literature is made distinctive by the extreme emotions of its characters and the adventurism common to romances. It also attempts to promote in the reader thrills of terror, awe, and a sense of wonder. But most of all, the principal feature of gothic fiction is darkness, both inner and outer. These are stories where the rear aspects of the human soul come out to play (Shelley, Panshin & Cook 2009).
Besides The Castle of Otranto, early novels in the gothic genre included: William Thomas Beckford’s Vathek, an Arabian Tale published in 1786; Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho published in 1794; The Monk, by Matthew Gregory Lewis published in 1796; and Wieland by Charles Brockden Brown published in 1798. Others include Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein in 1818, Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights in 1847, Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre, Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde in 1886 and Bram Stoker’s Dracula in 1897. Frankenstein, however, has an even grander distinction by being the very first science fiction novel.
Written at a time when the effects of the Industrial Revolution were beginning to be felt, the novel became the archetype for the science fiction tale: a story whose elements and characters express a sense of dread based on real or perceived changes in society brought about by science and technology since the time of the Industrial Revolution. Here, dread, harks back to the central theme of darkness, both inner and outer, in gothic literature: “the unknown, the unexpected, the unpredictable, and the potentially catastrophic,” (Shelley et al. 2009, p. 126).
The Use of Gothic in Jane Eyre to Portray the Position of Women in the Society
Jane Eyre is a novel written by Charlotte Bronte. The novel has become the canonical female gothic text, reproduced over and over again in films, an archetypal dream of the little woman finding love and a home with a fatherly beast, ritualistically tamed and shorn of his aristocratic lust and pride. Jane has become the embodiment of the gothic feminist equivalence of excellence, and it is this heroine who has come to represent the genre as a whole.
Jane took her cues from the stock devices of all gothic feminist heroines as she set her sights on Rochester and disposed of and replaced his inconvenient mad wife at the same time. Jane begins life as an orphan, without property or status, love, support or a family behind her, but she concludes her narrative with a wealthy but safely wounded husband and a first-born son and heir in tow. If her narrative is self-congratulatory, it is only because she has earned the right to crow. She has done what every gothic feminist has had to do: she has created a new family with herself in a matriarchal and unchallenged position of power.
Jane’s cousins, John, Georgiana and Eliza, lead pitiable lives caused by the errors of a self-indulgent, careless, and lazy mother. Their lives stand in direct opposition to the success and energy that Jane managed to create in her life. If a male heir and two wealthy women (the aristocracy) have every advantage in society, they still have to discipline themselves and work if they are to succeed, and this is what John and his sisters were not able to do. They grew up in a rich home with a mother who spoiled them but they ended up leading horrible lives with horrible marriages. The bourgeoisie and its work ethic triumph in this novel with a vengeance thanks to Jane (Hoeveler 1998).
As a child Jane felt that she had no appeal whatever against John’s bullying menaces and inflictions, but these early lessons in abuse taught her a valuable lesson that she will utilize later in life at Lowood: to endure and bide her time. Her aunt – the supposed authority figure in the household – refuses to defend or protect her from her son, while the servants are as helpless and as hopeless as Jane. Jane learns a valuable lesson, however, by seeing the impotence and corruption of the family’s authority figure. She learns very early that power structures like families function fundamentally as protection rackets, and she has no protector.
The force of Jane’s narrative is propelled by her desire to locate and claim her protector but one who will be eventually in her complete control. If the young Jane moaned that it seems useless to try to win any one’s favour, the mature Jane knew that favour’s protection and rewards are finally the only objects worth winning. Jane may have led a life of ceaseless reprimand and thankless fagging as a child but as an adult she was never corrected and had a rich husband and his servants to wait on her. The fairy-tale dynamics operating in the novel – the lowly brought to triumph and the lordly brought low – suggest that Jane Eyre as a novel functions like so many female gothic texts, as a species of wish fulfilment (Hoeveler 1998).
Living without one bit of love or kindness from anyone, Jane spends the first ten years of her life trying to master a battery of defence strategies. Like most female gothic heroines, Jane escapes first into books. Even at an early age, Jane appeared to be lost in an abusive psychic landscape, imagining herself either as the object of a variety of birds of prey, or more unconsciously, positioning herself as the attacker. Jane was correct in seeing herself as the victim of injustice. But from her aunt, Mrs. Reed’s point of view, Jane is not sociable or childlike; she is instead a compound of virulent passions, mean spirit, and dangerous duplicity.
Gothic feminists are forced to be two-faced or at least appear to be two-faced in the eyes of their enemies in order simply to survive. If a woman is not duplicitous, she will be defamed, slandered, and constructed into oblivion by the same forces that will take her estate, her family and finally her life. Jane learns that gothic heroines have few if any resources beyond their tongues. They can hurt and engage in name-calling, which is the child Jane’s earliest responses to her aunt’s continual abuse, or they can construct narratives that essentially rewrite history and present themselves as the innocent victims of tyranny and abuse (Hoeveler, 1998).
Indeed the story of Jane Eyre portrays the social ills that women in the society were subjected to in the hands of men and authority. On the other hand, Jane is a gothic heroine who stirs feelings of awe in readers. This is because she rises from a humble and humiliating background and creates a life of riches and honour through perseverance and wit.
The Use of Gothic in Northanger Abbey to Portray the Position of Women in the Society
Northanger Abbey is a novel written by Jane Austen and which was published in 1798. More topical than any of her other works, Northanger Abbey reads as a critique of both the gothic and the sentimental sensibilities that were being foisted on women at the time. If Catherine Morland, coded as gothic is foolish, then so is Isabella Thorpe, coded as sentimental. In many ways, Northanger Abbey fictionalizes the major points in Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Woman, showing that women who are given inadequate education will be victims of their follies, in addition to masculine hubris, lust and greed.
Taught from birth to fetishize their physical appearance as their only means of survival, women will become as comical as Mrs. Allen or as cunningly seductive as Isabella. Like lapdogs, cuddled and petted, such women are physically weak and mentally vacuous, living only for the attentions occasionally doled out to them by their reluctant masters. Into such a world of slaves steps the gothic tyrant, the ultimate male master with a whip. But in true Hegelian fashion, the master is as obsessed with the slave as the slave is with the master (Hoeveler 1998).
In Northanger Abbey, Austen attempts to rise above both postures and see both master and slave simultaneously. Her Catherine Morland is as sympathetic as her Henry Tilney. But her Mrs. Tilney is dead and the patriarchal general, her tyrannical husband, is still very much alive, still haunting the dreams of young women who would like to live in the sentimental landscapes constructed from their readings. In writing this most literarily dense work, Austen sought to reshape and redefine the central historical, social, and intellectual debates of her era.
She sought finally to suggest that masquerading or playing at the role of professional victim were as close as many women would ever get to being feminists in a society that polarized the genders as thoroughly as hers did. By 1803, the year Austen sold the manuscript of Northanger Abbey, the gothic heroine was a highly codified ideological figure, complete with stock physical traits, predictable parentage, and reliable class indicators. This heroine was ripe as a subject for parody, and such, presumably, was Austen’s motive when she created her gothic heroine-in-training, Catherine Abbey (Hoeveler 1998).
Austen appears to be dealing in all her novels with structured moral dichotomies, while the binary permeating the world of Catherine appears to be placed as made manifest in moral and gendered values: Bath or the abbey. But there is no real juxtaposition here. The feminine world of Bath – social artifice, hypocrisy, surface show contradicting reality, a species of imprisonment – does not contrast with the masculine world of Northanger Abbey – psychic artifice, self-haunting and haunted, concealment through deception of the mercenary motives for marriage. Jane Austen, through the first line of her novel “Catherine Morland in her infancy would have supposed her born to be a heroine,” (Hoeveler 1998, p. 129) hints that all women are born the heroines of their own rather inconspicuous lives, whether they look the part or not.
All women, wherever they are, have the desire for exciting, fulfilling, meaningful lives, and all are engaged in quests for such lives whether the conditions are propitious or not. Catherine is Austen’s Everywoman heroine – plain, ordinary, insufficiently educated, nothing special – but she still manages to become a heroine by following her instincts, waiting passively, and learning to keep her mouth shut.
In addition to her physical plainness – her thin awkward figure, a sallow skin without colour, dark lank hair, and strong feature – Catherine has quite ordinary and shockingly healthy parents. Her father, a clergyman, has no taste whatever for locking up his daughters and this very untypical mother of a gothic heroine manages to produce ten children and remain in the best of health. There were no hidden vaults, no foundlings in the neighbourhood, and never fear; in other words, something must and had to happen to throw a hero in her way. The implication is clear: a young woman needs only one thing to be a heroine, a hero.
Appearance, parentage, social trappings, and complications, all of these are mere excess baggage. A woman needs a man to test her spirit and define her character, and Catherine is introduced to two: the false suitor John Thorpe and the true suitor Henry Tilney. The double-suitor plot is used to suggest the entire artifice of the mating customs that prevail in a supposedly enlightened society (Hoeveler 1998).
Catherine is forced to set off to Bath for “all the difficulties and dangers of a six weeks’ residence in Bath,” (Hoeveler 1998, p. 130) her mind about as ignorant and uninformed as the female mind at seventeen usually is. With so many children at home, her mother is grateful to have one taken off her hands. But the contrast to the gothic world is made explicit when Mrs. Morland cautions Catherine about the dangers she may face in the outside world. The caution is the first time a gothic heroine is seen to handle her own money. Money appears previously only as a landed estate or as an inheritance, not as something that can be freely spent and accounted for by the heroine.
The change is significant, for with Catherine, whose inheritance is central to the plot, readers see the figure of a woman who represents empty cash value and yet who spends her own money. The change represents a subtle shift in how the middle class represented and thought about itself. Once mere potentiality, they have become embodied. They can spend, whereas before they merely had the potential to spend (Hoeveler 1998).
How Libraries Changed the Access to Literatures in Britain
Circulating libraries were important cultural institutions in Britain during the nineteenth century, affording the rising middle class access to a broad range of reading material – poetry, plays, histories, biography, philosophy, travels, and especially fiction. The first known circulating library that loaned books for a fee was most likely that of Scottish poet Allan Ramsay, who rented titles from its Edinburgh shop early in the 18th century.
Circulating libraries were of three types: specialist libraries; book clubs, which were flourishing and commercial libraries, which developed in major cities and most notably offered a wide collection of novels. Although university and college libraries flourished, as did special libraries for governments, associations and businesses, these were still not open to the general public (Black, Pepper & Bagshaw 2009).
On May 1894, the Clerkenwell Library, under the care of its librarian James Duff Brown (JDB), became the first public library in the United Kingdom to allow its readers free access to the book shelves of its lending library. JDB christened his new system ‘safeguarded open access’, which, to begin with, was viewed with suspicion and hostility by his fellow librarians and seen by many in the profession as a radical departure.
Eventually, open access became the dominant system in use in almost all public libraries. It may have been the wide-scale provision of open access that influenced the interior arrangement of the public library more than anything else, an influence that began in the 1890s and saw its heyday in the 1920s and 1930s. It could also be argued that the ideas behind open access laid the bedrock for our present-day view of the public library as an open, free and essentially democratic public space (Black et al. 2009).
In the 1890s, in the majority of public libraries, readers had to choose the book they required (in most cases only a single book could be borrowed at a time) by first consulting a printed catalogue and the library indicator. This device displayed which books were available and which were out on loan. If the book was available, the readers would request the librarian or assistant to retrieve it from the shelves. The open access system opened up the lending library.
Once the system had been established, it gained support from the public library pioneers such as Thomas Greenwood who in 1897 wrote, “it is little short of impertinence to condemn readers to spend hours consulting bad catalogues in search of books which may or may not be available …” (Black et al. 2009, p. 214). Earlier in July JDB had produced the first issue of the Clerkenwell Public Library Quarterly Guide for Readers. In it, he introduced the readers to the ‘open lending library’ with instructions on re-shelving books in the correct places, consultation of the location book and the reminder that the librarian and his staff were always available to assist.
The success in this new system was manifested in readers’ comments. After a year’s experiment with the system, JDB wrote, “the Open Lending Department has been the most interesting and successful feature of the year’s work. From the very first, it has proved attractive to borrowers and of benefit to them and the staff…,” (Black et al. 2009, p. 218). Access to literature thus increased significantly following the introduction and success of the open access public libraries.
The open access libraries meant that everyone, not just the rich and well to do middle class, could access the books when they wanted to. Besides the lack of usage fees, the open access public libraries eliminated the barriers that had been put in place by the closed access libraries. With the open access libraries, libraries could assess the available books on shelves before borrowing them. Thus readers had information about the books they wanted to borrow. This made it easier and more enjoyable for the readers because it eliminated the chances of borrowing books that were not of interest to the readers.
How Working Men’s Clubs Changed Access to Literatures in Britain
In the 1820s mechanics’ institutes began to spring up throughout the English-speaking world. They often evolved into public libraries, especially in Anglophone Canada. By 1851 there were approximately 700 mechanics’ institutes in Britain, though their collections averaged just fewer than 1000 volumes. Mechanics’ institutes often alienated working men, who chafed ate their dress codes, and bans on controversial literature. They created alternative libraries such as the Lord Street Working Men’s Reading Room in Carlisle, founded when 50 men collectively bought newspapers to read about the European revolutions in 1848.
The Reading Room grew rapidly and moved into a new Elizabethan-style building in 1851, with congratulatory messages from Charles Dickens and Thomas Carlyle. But that grand physical plant was only constructed with middle-class assistance, and the taint of bourgeois patronage drove away readers. On their own, Carlisle workingmen organized more than 24 reading rooms between 1836 and 1854, with almost 1,400 members and a total stock of 4,000 books.
These figures suggest that there were thousands of worker-run libraries in industrial Britain, though most were small and ephemeral. Of the 900 clubs belonging to the Working Men’s Club and Institute Union in 1903, 500 maintained libraries with a total of 187,000 volumes. In South Wales, miners managed more than 100 coalfield libraries by 1934, with an average stock of 3,000 volumes. The pride of the system was the Tredegar Workmen’s Institute, which boasted an 800-seat cinema, an inexpensive concert series, and an annual circulation of 100,000 volumes (Stam 2001, p. 180).
These figures show that the working men’s clubs contributed greatly to the access to literatures in the 19th and early 20th centuries. The libraries that were started and maintained by the men’s clubs made it possible for people to access different types of literatures such as books, newspapers, novels and poems. Nevertheless, the libraries maintained by the working men’s clubs started declining following the expansion of the free and open access public libraries.
Reference List
Black, A., Pepper, S., & Bagshaw, K. 2009, Books, buildings and social engineering: early public libraries in Britain from past to present, Ashgate Publishing Ltd., Burlington, VA.
Hoeveler, D.L. 1998, Gothic feminism: the professionalization of gender from Charlotte Smith to the Brintes, Pennsylvania State University Press, University Park, PA.
Shelley, M.W., Panshin, A.C., & Cook, P. 2009, Frankenstein or the Modern Prometheus, Arc Manor LLC, Rockfield, MD.
Smith, A. 2007, Gothic literature, Edinburgh University Press, George Square, Ed.
Stam, D.H. 2001, International dictionary of library histories, volume 1, Taylor & Francis, Chicago, IL.