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GOTHIC LITERATURE


What is gothic? This question can, of course, not be an answered in one sentence. It’s clear that gothic is not only about music, it’s a life style, a certain sensibility. According to Collins Cobuild English Language Dictionary: The word gothic is used in three ways. First of all, a building such as a cathedral that is gothic has a style of architecture that is distinguish by all tall pillars,high vaulted ceilings and pointed arches.Furthermore, gothic is used to describe in which strange, mesterious adventures happen in dark and lonely places such as the ruins of the castle. Gothic is also a style of printing of writing in which the latters are very ornate. Finally the word is used to describe a subculture. The period of Gothic Literature is generally dated from 1764 to 1840. The popularity of gothic novels and dramas proliferated during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century in Britain when England found itself in the midst of a social upheaval. The contradiction between the English ideology in which individual desires and collective needs participated in perfect reciprocity and actual economic and political conditions began to surface. It is out of this social climate that the Gothic novel grew: a new and fearful genre for a new and fearful time. At the very beginning, it was dismissed as mindless, decadent, or too excessively antirational. It was not highly respected by its contemporary critics or by later literary scholars and academics. However, it has enjoyed an academic renaissance in the past few years due to the efforts of some feminist, poststructuralist, and cultural materialist scholars. These people provide new insights into the ideological complexities and social function of this literary genre. Gothic fiction consists of a set of analyzable displacements about what it means to be a human being and comprises a well-defined canon, produced within a narrow space of time. It is possible to read them as reflections of a distinct social psyche, that is, as illustrating deep-seated concerns and anxieties associated with a specific political and historical moment. Gothic fiction is mainly concerned with the outsider, whether the stationary figure who represses his difference, or the wandering figure who seeks for some kind of salvation, or else the individual who for whatever reason moves entirely outside the norm. In any event, he is beyond the moderating impulses in society, and he must be punished for his transgression. A great deal of Gothic Literature is about injustice. The society which generated Gothic fiction was one which was becoming aware of injustice in a variety of different areas, and which doubted the ability of eighteenth-century social explanations to cope with the facts of experience. We can see it in the dawning consciousness of inequality in the relations between the sexes; in the romantic emphasis on the partiality and non-neutrality of reason as a guiding light for social behavior; in the increasing awareness that there are parts of the psyche which do not appear to act according to rational criteria; in the constantly reiterated thought that, after all and despite so-called natural law, it is still often the sins of the fathers which are visited on their descendants. Gothic writing emerges at a particular and definable stage in the development of class relations: we may define this as the stage when the bourgeoisie began to try to understand the conditions and history of their own ascent. This is the reason for this kind of literature to mainly deal with the coming of industry, the move towards the city, the regularization of patterns of labor in the late eighteenth century. Under such circumstances, it is hardly surprising to find the emergence of a literature whose key motifs are paranoia, manipulation and injustice, and whose central project is understanding the inexplicable, the taboo, the irrational.

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