Gothic Novel, Male

Abstract

Many of the ingredients of the Gothic novel are hundreds of years old, while some elements arose as recently as the eighteenth century. Its curious combination of features has also lasted 250 years across the nineteenth century and right through many novels, stories, plays, films, and television shows of the present day. But the ‘Gothic’ novel in prose, which became a major, albeit controversial, force in English Romantic literature (see Gamer 2000), does have an inaugural text: Horace Walpole's novella The Castle of Otranto , first published in 1764 and then reissued in 1765 with the generic subtitle A Gothic Story . Walpole's 1765 Preface even makes a case for launching a ‘new species of romance’ under that label: as a revolutionary ‘blend’ of aristocratic ‘ancient romance’ conventions harkening back to the Middle Ages and even post‐Homeric Greece (where ‘all was imagination and improbability’, often involving ‘stupendous phenomena’ and ‘machines’ of supernatural agency) with the more ‘modern romance’, hence middle‐class, assumptions of Samuel Richardson, Henry Fielding, and Tobias Smollett in their novels of the 1740s and 1750s (where ‘nature is always intended to be … copied with success’ and the ‘agents … think, speak, and act, as it might be supposed mere men and women would do’, albeit in ‘extraordinary’ older‐romance conditions; Walpole 1996: 9–10). As Walpole hoped, moreover, the resulting key features of his ‘Gothic Story’ have had a long life in subsequent fiction, from its antiquated spaces with hidden or underground levels haunted by spectres or monstrosities (imagined or ‘real’) from the past, its fragmented hints of an obscured primal crime or horror at the root of the apparent hauntings, its hyperbolic styles of narration and dialogue oscillating between intimations of Shakespeare and echoes of Richardsonian sentimentality, and tugs of war in the conflicted minds of the characters between ideologies valuing inheritance and predestination, rooted in once‐aristocratic and older Catholic beliefs (the ‘ancient’), and assumptions of un predetermined personal development under immediate environmental pressures, basic to more recent middle‐class Protestantism and empirical philosophy in the wake of John Locke (the ‘modern’).