The Gothic Genre has very little of value to offer the student of Literature –so what is it doing on an A-level course?

The gothic is generally thought to have emerged as part of a rebellion against ‘stifling’ 18th Century rules about Beauty – its proportions, its harmonies, its simplicity. The truth is rather more complex, as far as I can tell. Addison had written articles in his Spectator about the pleasures of the imagination and had pleaded the case for ‘something more essential to art: something that astonishes and elevates the fancy and gives greatness to the mind of the reader.’ This something came to be known as the ‘sublime’ which soon became a fashionable word in literary and art circles. This concept of the sublime is tangled up in political, religious as well as literary and philosophical thinking of the early eighteenth century. The enlightenment, with its confident assumptions about reason and its power to reveal the truth about existence and civil society had rattled the cages of churchmen and the aristocracy across Europe. And even before the glory and terror of the French Revolution, there had been arguments for the use of feelings as a guide towards truth again and a nostalgia for the old traditions (of monarchy and church).

The gothic writing of the time in particular was associated with this imaginative return to what was considered barbaric ‘gothic’ medievalism – a past, which was not rule-bound in the way the present was, untamed by reason and the limits of mortal humanity, vaulting in its ambitions towards the greatness of the sacred. This was in part then a rebellion against current thinking – but it was also profoundly counter-revolutionary; the French Revolution was after all a child of the enlightenment in many ways – and so reason, heralded as a harbinger of peace of reasonable co-existence, had brought horror and fear.

And so the Gothic could call itself subversive: it wanted to reach beyond the safe proportionate art of neo-classicism. It wanted art to reach the sublime: that contemplation of the hugeness of life, of the meaning of it all in which the individual is at once tiny and insignificant and hugely part of it all. And the gothic claims to open the doors on the sublime through fear and horror – as Beethoven does through Joy in his 9th Symphony and Bach through hope in his Cantatas. Fear and horror are powerful experiences – and valid and important responses to evil, which is what the gothic genre ostensibly ‘explores, challenges, interrogates’ even as it challenges the cosy safety of the ordinary rational world.

However where exactly the gothic stands in relation to all this, whether it be politically or morally or even aesthetically is deeply ambivalent. It is never very clear whether we are to abhor or admire Count Dracula. And while some would argue that this ambivalence is the very power and beauty of the gothic genre, it seems to be a weakness – because it fails then to be a true exploration – it is not even using feeling as a guide towards any truth, but simply enjoys the sensation. It is too often titillation, with no greatness of mind in sight.

So the pure gothic (stories of vampires in castles, of dungeons in wild settings, of disproportionate desire and of cruelty) fails to deliver an experience of the sublime, because in its treatment of evil, of power and of strong sensations it is misguided: it flirts with evil, with power and with sensations and so instead of being frightening it turns out to be merely sordid. And, in its pure form (which publishers now call ‘red and black’ books) it has not moved on from The Monk at all. It remains a clichéd niche genre, obsessed with dated attitudes to sexuality and a purple prose style. Stories of vampires, of deviant monks and swooning damsels lose sight of the lofty ideals of rebellion against the hypocrisy of ‘goodness’ and uses very real dark and painful experiences: loss, madness, loneliness, unrequited love merely to titillate their readers, watchers.

Dracula’s portrayal of various ‘unorthodox’ sexual practices is not frightening; is not subversive - kinky sex (between consenting adults) is just sex it does not qualify for a revolution – artistic or political. As for the sparkly, effete vampires of Anne Rice and Stephanie Meyers – well they barely reach beyond slightly dodgy sexual fantasies about co-dependent, obsessional relationships.

Finally in its obscure and irresolute vacillation between reality and fantasy the gothic locates evil dangerously outside the human heart, allowing readers to step back from it and feel unchallenged by it – merely titillated by pleasurable fear. A little shudder, delightful as it may be, is a frisson at best - it is not sublime!

However the course is called ‘Elements of the Gothic’ and, apart from Dracula, there are in fact not many real gothic texts on the reading list. This is what writers on the Gothic call the ‘diffusion’ of the genre. I am not convinced that it isn’t mere sloppy language and a convenient and easy way to dignify a taste for such reading material.

There is nothing ‘gothic’ in the searing pity and fear we feel at Hamlet’s final words: absent thee from felicity a while and in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain to tell my story’ or Lear’s realisation in his madness out in the storm of his failure as a king: ‘ye poor naked wretches wheresoever you are that bide the pelting of this pitiless storm, how shall your unhoused heads, your unfed sides, your looped and windowed raggedness defend against seasons such as these? O I have ta’en too little care of this’ and finally Macbeth’s realisation that he has murdered sleep, that his own darkness, his evil has made his every tomorrow meaningless that even trumpet-tongued pity will not ring for him again?

When Milton’s Satan realises ‘I myself am hell’, that despair is answered by the invocation to Light at the beginning of Book III as well as the compassion and love, not only of God for humans, but of humans for each other – the tenderness of Adam and Eve. I am not convinced that it is OK to read Books I and II in isolation as an example of ‘elements of the gothic’. Does it not lead to a profound misunderstanding of the text? I am reasonably sure Milton was not in the least bit interested in the gothic. He was clearly interested in the nature of evil, though and in goodness and salvation, too.

There has always been literature, since medieval passion plays and indeed before which explores darkness, because for an art to be a true representation of life, it must face that darkness too. And there are texts on this course, which do offer such an exploration: Shelley’s Frankenstein, Marlowe’s Faustus, Macbeth, but I am not sure that lumping these texts together under the title ‘gothic’ is at all helpful. The associations of frisson with the gothic – of the pleasures of fear, the attractions of evil – represent a very different ‘weltblick’ from that Shakespeare, Milton and Marlowe.

I can think of no literary novel or play which does not explore evil in some way. The clash between good and evil, on a huge or a domestic scale is after all the great drama of human existence. But I suspect that it is both arrogant and ignorant to call all such concerns gothic. It seems flippant and misguided to examine Macbeth’s understanding of his own damnation but inability to reverse his ambition in the same light as the bluebeard tradition of Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber.And this is not being precious about the canon, though there is a part of me that says, well why on earth not: humans are the symbolic species of the planet, using symbols to make sense of life and ourselves is what we do: using that capacity, which at its best creates Hamlet, Middlemarch, the Sistine Chapel and Monteverdi’s evening vespers merely to titillate seems not only trivial, it seems sordid and cheap.

My doubts about this course are of a different order: they are about attitudes to goodness and evil, about the spirit in which the gothic is often taught. There is an unthinking linking of the (wrong) sexual repression of the church and society with all other forms of restraint. There is an enthusiastic criticism of the traditional forces of goodness, which have been all too often hypocritical, it is true; but how is flirtation with evil an answer to that? No-one in their right minds really wants darkness to rule: we know what that looks like – it looks like Hitler, Stalin, Idi Amin and Mugabe. Surely it is only the self-indulgent self-pleasuring of a bored and far too safe, risk-insured materialistic Bourgeoisie that pretends evil is sexy, simply because the church wrongly called sex evil?

Theories about the sublime were heralded as a new and secular language with which to grasp profound spiritual experiences. Thrilling encounters with sentimentalised vampires seem to be a poor substitute for that. Why has that project of the sublime been denigrated so? Why has the course not been called elements of the sublime? Why do we let the image of a vampire dominate the course by calling it ‘gothic’? Why are we so quick to trivialise, to give in to a shallow moral and aesthetic relativism in which anything goes and where the fashionable hunt for superficial linking elements (the wild landscape, the dark and attractive anti-hero – you know the list) will drown out the important differences between texts.

Pastoral

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The Value of Literature

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