What is Gothic literature? Any introduction will tell you that Gothic literature became popular in the 18th century with novels like Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto. Then it exploded in the 19th century with the likes of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Bram Stoker’s Dracula. And, through the 20th and 21st centuries, writers like Stephen King and Shirley Jackson have kept it alive and well.
But how are they connected? What makes a book Gothic? And who am I to tell you?
An Introduction to Gothic Literature
It would be irresponsible of me to promise you all the answers, dear reader. I’m not a Gothic scholar, just someone who reads an awful lot. I was originally drawn to Gothic literature by the stories themselves. The stranger in the night, the house on the cliff, the curse of the family. But it was the stories behind those stories that dragged me under completely. By incorporating fragments, falsehoods and frame narratives, the writers of Gothic literature blurred the lines between fact and fiction. Their works moved between times, even between worlds.
To give you the best introduction to Gothic literature, I’ll need to move between these worlds, too. I don’t mean the worlds of fact and fiction – my sources are at the end of this post and any errors are my own. No, I mean that, to explain Gothic literature (and what I think makes it great), I intend to cover not only the stories themselves, but the stories, real and fake, behind those stories.
This post is part of a series called Inquisitions. This series collects longer essays on even longer-standing conceits from Gothic art, literature, architecture and beyond. You can browse the complete series here. In the meantime, I thank you as always for reading this one.
A Definition of Gothic Fiction
I’ve attempted elsewhere on this blog to reduce my definition of Gothic to a single phrase. I’ll apply it to literature here: Gothic literature is any story in which the past haunts the present.
It’s broad. It’s an oversimplification. But it’ll serve as an introduction to Gothic literature. It worked for Horace Walpole.
With The Castle of Otranto, Walpole codified many of the characteristics of Gothic literature that we know today. His 1764 novel features an innocent young woman, a scheming old man, a medieval setting and an enormous ghost. An ancient prophecy binds them all. Other novels had done these things before. Thomas Leland’s Longsword, Earl of Salisbury: An Historical Romance could just as easily be the first Gothic novel. But it was Walpole’s use of dreams that set him apart. With dreams driving the story, Walpole made the subconscious real and gave memories meaning. He released the past to haunt the present.
Why Was The Castle of Otranto Called Gothic?
In part, because Walpole said so. He wrote his novel at Strawberry Hill, the “little plaything house” he built in a Gothic Revival style. At Strawberry Hill House, painted wallpaper gave the illusion of Gothic groining surrounding the staircase. Reliefs on the gallery ceiling were really papier-mâché. At one time, the battlements were supposed to be made of cardboard. Everything about Strawberry Hill called back to chivalry at a time when English national identity was more unstable than ever. By calling his novel “a Gothic story”, Walpole hoped to play with literature the same game he had with architecture.
The characteristics were set and so was the name. In close pursuit came a swarm of brilliant writers, each marking Gothic literature in their own way.
Somewhere Between Horror and Terror
No introduction to Gothic literature would be complete without mentioning Ann Radcliffe and Matthew Lewis. In the remaining years of the 18th century, there were no writers more important to the genre. Still, their respective impacts took very different shapes. Radcliffe famously summed them up as the difference between horror and terror. Where Lewis could evoke horror with his physical, corporeal descriptions of danger, Radcliffe preferred to keep the threat in the minds of her characters – and readers. The uncertainty between what’s real and what’s imagined haunted Gothic literature for centuries to come.
Stories of Uncertainty
You’ll find this uncertainty in Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel Frankenstein, in the tale of Victor Frankenstein’s monstrous experiment. After sailors discover the Doctor and bring him aboard their ship, he tells them the story of his creation and the ensuing quest to destroy it. His narrative contains another, the Monster’s. The frame narrative – a letter from the ship’s captain Robert Walton – contains them both. These nested stories and multiple narrators create the same sensation of obscurity for the reader and the characters. The truth is unknowable.
It’s in Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel Dracula, another epistolary novel. This time, it’s the diary entries and letters of several characters – what Jonathan Harker himself calls a “mass of material … hardly one authentic document!” Though most of these narratives agree, the limitations of each character’s viewpoint – and their interpretations of events – have given scholars plenty to discuss, dissect and disagree over.
Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray – great Gothic novels one and all – all create the same sense of uncertainty. Some past belief or superstition, memory or deed comes back to haunt the present. And it blurs the lines between what’s true and what’s not.
What I love most about this uncertainty, however, is when Gothic writers bring it off the page.
The Lie That Started Gothic Literature
It wasn’t only with his use of dreams that Horace Walpole gave shape to Gothic literature as we know it. As a Member of Parliament, he was concerned that his fiction would bring him into disrepute. But in 1761, a Scottish antiquarian named James Macpherson published his Fragments of Ancient Poetry collected in the Highlands of Scotland, a collection of poems and fragments presented as a sort of new Scottish canon. In 1765, Thomas Percy would publish Reliques of Ancient English Poetry, doing the same for England. In 1764, Walpole spotted the trend and decided to use it to his benefit.
With the title of the first edition, Walpole obscured the novel’s origin as a work of fiction. The Castle of Otranto, A Story. Translated by William Marshal, Gent. From the Original Italian of Onuphrio Muralto, Canon of the Church of St. Nicholas at Otranto wasn’t traced back to him until the publication of the second edition. Walpole claimed credit only when he could see the book was a success.
The effect of Walpole’s lie did not go unnoticed. We’ve seen how it influenced some of his most immediate successors – in the epistolary styles of Frankenstein and Dracula, especially. But, even today, characteristics like the fragment, the falsehood and the frame narrative pervade Gothic literature. Much to my own personal delight.
A Genre of Falsehoods
House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski makes great use of the Gothic falsehood by applying real-world academic methods to a fictional story. In it, tattoo artist Johnny Truant becomes obsessed with a documentary called The Navidson Record. He spends the novel collecting, ordering and analysing pages of academic research, film transcripts and countless footnotes.
Max Brooks’s World War Z uses Gothic fragments to tell the oral history of a zombie invasion ten years after it has come to an end. The novel collects transcripts from dozens of interviews to build a picture no one person could offer. (Brooks’s previous work, The Zombie Survival Guide, appears in the world of World War Z, deepening the falsehood.)
And in Interview With the Vampire, Anne Rice uses the Gothic frame narrative to recount the life story of the vampire Louis de Pointe du Lac as told to a young reporter – while leaving herself the space to explore the reporter’s thoughts and reactions to the tale.
These novels – and many more – present themselves, to varying degrees, as tales from both worlds. At their best, they invite the reader to infer what they can from the letters, transcripts, rumours, footnotes – Jonathan Harker’s “mass of material” – and take what they can from it. It draws the reader in in a way I’ve always fallen for and leaves them uncertain of what was real and what was imagined. As Horace Walpole wrote of the inspiration for The Castle of Otranto, “I waked one morning at the beginning of last June from a dream, of which all I could recover was that I had thought myself in an ancient castle…”
Gothic Literature Is the Past Haunting the Present
When I read Gothic literature, I see the stranger in the night, the house on the cliff, the curse of the family. These things exist in the text itself, even if they don’t enter into the real world. They make me feel horror, like Matthew Lewis would have wanted. But when I read Gothic literature, I also think about fragments, falsehoods and frame narratives. I look for the ways it might be deceiving me. These make me feel terror, like Ann Radcliffe intended.
Gothic literature lives with a foot in both worlds – the past and the present, the truth and the lie, the horrific and the terrible. It lives where one haunts the other. That’s how I like to explain Gothic literature.
For no other reason than because I wish to share it, my second favourite introduction to Gothic literature is this recipe for ‘Terrorist Novel Writing’ from 1798.
Take – An old castle, half of it ruinous.
A long gallery, with a great many doors, some secret ones.
Three murdered bodies, quite fresh.
As many skeletons, in chests and presses.
An old woman hanging by the neck; with her throat cut.
Assassins and desperadoes ‘quant suff’.
Noise, whispers, and groans, threescore at least.
Mix them together, in the form of three volumes to be taken at any of the watering places, before going to bed.
Like any writer who tangles with the Gothic, I’m in debt to what came before. These are some of the books I found useful while writing this post:
- Gothic: Four Hundred Years of Excess, Horror, Evil and Ruin by Richard Davenport-Hines, 1998
- The Gothic: A Very Short Introduction by Nick Groom, 2012
- A New Companion to the Gothic edited by David Punter, 2012
- Gothic: An Illustrated History by Roger Luckhurst, 2021