THE GOTHIC NOVEL

THE AGE OF TRANSITION

• Between Classicism and Romanticism
• Early romanticism

Pre-romanticism

T    A COMMON DISTASTE for the FORMALITY

ELEGANCE

ARTIFICIALITY of the Augustans

NEW AESTHETIC AND SOCIAL THEORIES

YOUNG

T    GENIUS = a divine gift, a product of originality and inspiration

T    The genius flourished in primitive ages when people were in contact with NATURE, the spontaneous expression of feeling

T    The most natural were the most IGNORANT (they don't know so they are happy):

the savage, the peasant and the children

ROUSSEAU

T    Cult of CHILDHOOD

T    Cult of the NOBLE SAVAGE: man is naturally good and the institutions make him bad, so there must be a return to nature in which the primitives lived happy and innocent

T    Cult of DEMOCRACY: he's interested in the poor

T    Cult of IMAGINATION: it is an escape from reality

T    Cult of NATURE: it is a refuge from a corrupted society

T    Cult of MELANCHOLY, because happiness comes from emotions and imagination, while reality leads to depression, melancholy and detection

In this period there different schools of poets:

ELEGIAC POETS

T    They find relief in nature and in the life of country people

T    Thomson, Collins

T    Reflective moods

T    Melancholy favoured long solitary walks in the country

T    Interest in ruins, deserted places, night scenes, tombs, stormy land places

T    All these things reminded man of his mortality

GRAVEYARD POETS 

T    Churchyards macabre

loneliness of the grave

Meditation on death and transitory of life

T    Young : "Night thoughts"

Blair: "The grave"

Gray: "Elegy written in a country church yard"

T    They inspired Pindemonte's "Cimiteri" and Foscolo's "Sepolcri"

INTEREST IN NORDIC AND CELTIC CULTURE AND IN THE MIDDLE AGES

T    This developed the vogue for LITERARY DISCOVERIES

T    Thomas Chatterton: "The Rowley poems"

T    He poisoned himself at 17 because ha hadn't wrote them but he found them and no-one believed him a MYTH of the young genius unappreciated by the world

a SYMBOL of the artist as an outcast

OSSIANIC POETRY

T    James Mac Pherson : "Fragments of ancient poetry collected in the highlands of Scotland and translated from the Gaelic or erse language"

It became an instant success so he wrote the poems Fingal - 1762

Temora - 1763

collected in the "Works of Ossian"- 1765 he's a 3^rd century Gaelic warrior and bard

He's compared to Homer natural genius

sons of nature

singers from a          lost age of ideals

Other poets are in no school:

W.COWPER

T    A romantic figure of the insane poet

T    Happiness of rural life

R.BURNS

T    A poet of rural life

T    The national poet of Scotland

W.BLAKE

T    A seer, a prophet, a visionary

THE TRAVELLER

In this period there is a vogue for the GRAND TOUR, indispensable for any fashionable young man. He had to know the FASHIONABLE SITES of the continent, especially Italy.

We can say that there is a travelling mania.

THE IDEAL TRAVELLER by GIBBON

T    Know languages

T    Have an ear for music

T    Have an eye for artistic and natural beauty

T    Be able to fix enchanting scenes and sights in sketches, drawing or watercolours.

We can distinguish:

T    Early in the century he's attracted by monumental ruins, churches and palaces.

T    Later he has the cult of untouched nature (taste for winding mountain roads, turbulent rivers, nocturnal landscapes, steep cliffs)

HISTORY OF THE PERIOD

T    GEORGE III

T    AMERICAN REVOLUTION: 4 July 1776, Declaration of Independence

T    FRENCH REVOLUTION and NAPOLEONIC WARS until his final defeat in Waterloo, 1815

T    INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION, which took from an agricultural to a manufacturing country (about 1760 - 1830/1850)

It also took to scientific progress that destroyed the old system: mechanization, with steam-powered machines (Watt, 1769), began the Industrial Era.

The innovations caused less need of workers unemployment poverty and crime slums with appalling hygienic conditions that caused illnesses and a high death rate.

For the workers there were inhuman conditions.

EDMUND BURKE

1757: "A philosophical enquiry into the origin of our ideas of the sublime and beautiful"

T    BEAUTIFUL classical harmony, balance, regularity in form

it corresponds to classical or baroque art

it is founded on pleasure

T    SUBLIME strength, irregularity, fear, pain, terror, violence

it ancitipates Freud

whatever is visibly terrible or great in dimension

for example: silence, obscurity, ocean, Gothic buildings, medieval castles or mysterious events

there is the idea of terrifying beauty, linked with the sense of danger, terror, impossible, competition, admiration, reverence, respect.

two conditions make things even more terrible: OBSCURITY

MYSTERY

THE GOTHIC NOVEL

T    A revolt against the REALISM of the novelists of the Augustan age

T    Aimed at THRILLING THE READER not at amusing or educating him

T    Owed much to the fashion for ANCIENT RUINS and WILD SCENERY

T    Introduced into England by Italian printers Monsù Desiderio

Agostino Tassi

Salvator Rosa

they painted rugged mountains, wild woods, roaring streams, ruins, romantic highwaymen

THE SCHOOL OF TERROR

1764: year of publication of Walpole's "Castle of Otranto". It started a mode, called "The school of terror", popular till the 1820's.

T    Ann Radcliffe: "The mysteries of Udolpho"   1794 rational explanation at the end

"The Italian"

T    M.G.Lewis : "The Monk" 1796 violence, erotism, witchcraft

T    Mary Shelley: "Frankenstein" 1818

ESSENTIAL INGREDIENTS

T    Complicated plots set in strange catholic and unfamiliar countries or in an imaginary past time, like Middle Ages

T    Terrifying descriptions extraordinary situations

supernatural events

monsters, ghosts, vampires

T    The facts take place in prisons

convents or abbeys

haunted castles

any type of Gothic building

T    There must be secret passages

dark corridors

dreadful dungeons

T    Settings must be surrounded by thick forests

impenetrable woods

T    Other characteristics are ghostly moonlight

thunderstorms

natural phenomena

night-darkness

wind

T    Sense of mystery, awe, suspense

CHARACTERS

T    They are STEREOTYPES

T    The hero satanic, cruel, cynical, the typical villain

victim of negative impulses

handsome, mysterious, melancholic, dark-haired

irresistible to women

have a secret in the past (mostly incest)

the wanderer, the vampire, the outcast, the overreacher

one ho seeks forbidden knowledge, like Marlowe's "Dr.Faustus",

a model for the Byronic hero

T    The heroine beautiful, shy, helpless

a myth of persecuted maiden

a model was Richardson's "Pamela" and "Clarissa"

WHAT DOES GOTHIC MEAN?

T    MEDIEVAL: related to the style of the Middle Ages (12^th-14^th century) in architecture

T    IRREGULAR and BARBAROUS

T    WILD and SUPERNATURAL, that means mysterious and fearful

BURKE'S THEORIES

Following Burke's theories of the horrid and sublime the gothic novelists discovered

T    The charm of HORROR

T    The power of SENSATION connected with the grotesque

the supernatural

The sublime is the essential element of the Gothic novel, horror films and Stephen King's books.

HORACE WALPOLE

Fond of the MIDDLE AGES, he tried to revive the atmosphere of the time first through ARCHITECTURE (his house was a little gothic castle, that he described as a "sublime dream") and then through LITERATURE.

In 1764 he published "The castle of Otranto", a blend of love stories

persecution

supernatural

For the great use of the supernatural he was inspired by a Venetian architect, PIRANESI, especially in "The carceri", a collection of paints; they are described in this way: "gloomy dungeons surmounted by dark arches, crossed by impossible bridges and stairs leading nowhere, all filled with instruments of torture and death."