Gothic novels

castleotranto

By Anonymous (Horace Walpole for the words, presumably by anonymous for the typesetter) Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org

Gothic novels are particularly revealing if we want to understand the transformations of the context and the cultural background which take place in the last decade of the XVIII century. The Gothic is connected to the new progressive appreciation for emotion and feelings; to a new remark on fantasy, to the attraction for mystery.

The Gothic includes the taste for sublime and picturesque, which act as landscape for the events narrated in the stories. We often find the elements of dream and supernatural which the helpless heroines are compelled to cope with. The young virgins are continuously chased by villains, terrified by ghosts or mysterious forces, and even if there is always a happy ending, the story retains a pervasive atmosphere of terror and astonishment.

This esthetic and sensibility are definitely opposed to the classicist esthetic, that is the religion of Reason. The mood of the Gothic is associated to the Pre-Romantic poetry, which transforms the Latin funeral elegy into poems on the churchyards, into celebration of the ruins, into meditation over the past and the death.

The Castle of Otranto (1764) is the first Gothic novel, written by Horace Walpole. Twenty years later William Beckford wrote Vathek (1782), but it is with Ann Radcliffe that the elements ‘invented’ by Walpole (the castle, the abbey, the forest, the girl victim of persecution, the villain, the positive hero, the escape, etc.) become a code to be replicated and imitated. Ann Radcliffe wrote The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) and  the Italian (1797). On a different level is situated The Monk (1796), written by Matthew Gregory Lewis, which is sometimes considered one of the best novels written in this century. Mary Shelley is also to be included in the number of Gothic novelists. Her Frankenstein (1816) is one of the best novels of the genre, whose value is continuously reconsidered nowadays.

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