Is it possible to write an American Gothic novel? Southern Gothic explores issues of prejudice and race within peeling, decaying plantation houses, but can a writer more directly translate conventions and patterns from the original Gothic novels to her own work? Gothic novelists in the 18th and early 19th centuries wrote during a time of shifting class and religious boundaries. What scared their audiences may no longer scare us. Several events happened as I began my study in the Gothic genre that made me sensitive to what I needed to keep and leave behind as I rewrote my story, “Knowing is Half the Feast,” into an attempt at American Gothic, “Losing Face."
I spent the first 23 years of my life under the self-perpetuated illusion that I had some mental impairment people ignored due to my slight disability. I believed having this meant that each eccentric moment, every ordinary slip or mistake, was a symptom of a problem that no one else acknowledged. Last year, a doctor informed me that my handicap is only physical. Everyone around me wasn’t denying a reality I knew was true.
Shortly after this freeing revelation, my alcoholic father reacted badly to a request to go no-contact, and I sought a restraining order. In his response, my father denied being a threat, and claimed that I made it all up. He attempted to negate a childhood spent fighting him for car keys and being targeted for existing. My dad said I have schizophrenia and histrionic personality disorder. My sister and my mother sent statements in accord. If they all agreed, was I crazy? The judge did not agree with my family. Someone in a position of power believed me. What if she felt that parents have their children’s welfare in mind, and that I fabricated my own past? This is the kind of terror we need in today’s world: less the fear of the monster and more the fear of others’ authority of us and the weakness of our own minds, which I call “societal terror."
In this situation, my parents are like the capricious, self-obsessed counts and lords in Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho. These characters mistreat the naïve heroine Emily from self-interest as much as malice. Most of the fear comes less from the supernatural and more from how people treat Emily. Radcliffe, one of the most popular Gothic authors of the late eighteenth century, defines two ways of invoking sensation in a reader: terror “awakens the faculties,” while horror “annihilates them”. She does not make a distinction between terror that awakens the faculties and that which subjects us to the cruelties of people and psychology. Mysteries more explicitly creates and debunks supernatural terrors; Radcliffe makes use of the fear that comes from relations with others, but in the 18th century this dynamic was the situation in which a friendless young woman inevitably finds herself. Given our more egalitarian world, this is less a given and more a tool to be used. There is a constant note of both original terror and societal terror throughout Gothic novels, and these can be more heavily utilized when we drop other aspects of 18th-century Gothic novels. As life becomes more hectic, how we interpret the world and how we act toward others becomes more vital.
Per Horace Walpole, the author who first made use of the term Gothic to describe his novel, the genre seeks to subject ordinary people to extraordinary circumstances. It is an attempt to blend two previous genres. “In the former, all was imagination and improbability.” In the latter, Walpole says, “the great resources of fancy have been dammed up, by a strict adherence to common life.” Walpole set his novella The Castle of Otranto in a vaguely foreign place that does not exist, and notes in his first, anonymous preface that the story might have been written during the First Crusades. Here, Walpole created a foundation for other storytelling devices among Gothic authors:
Castle is supposedly a found manuscript. Frankenstein was originally published anonymously like Castle, and it features nested stories, as with The Monk, that permit Mary Shelley and Matthew Lewis to cram a variety of genres into their novels. Like Dracula, Frankenstein uses nothing but journal entries and news articles. These aspects are central to the feel of original Gothic novels, but use of “found” manuscripts and journal entries seems artificial to a population that does not write nearly as much or as personally as the nouveau-learned middle and upper classes in the 18th century. We also do not need as much variety or as many nested stories in a single work, since we can publish at the speed of blog.
As Americans, we need to leave behind some of these artificial writing tools, and the collective psychological history borne by British authors of the 18th century. The Gothic architecture that names the genre comes from the Goths who sacked Rome. They represent the seedy underbelly of Europe to which more civilized writers in the 1700s could safely return to find catharsis while class and religion were at a furor around them. Gothic writers turned Catholic authority figures and convents into representations of danger and woe for the same reason: during a time when rationality was supposedly replacing religious and supernatural events, Anglican writers flirted with the mysticism surrounding the Catholic faith, even unto the surviving connection between vampires and crosses. We do not have that sort of tumult here and now; we are more focused on economic and political upheaval than cultural or religious ones. Convents are largely gone, and short of people making vampires out of the Eucharist and the predator priest scandals, religious taboos are less of a focus for us than they were for 18th-century authors. Oppressive Gothic architecture sets the tone—but we have fewer castles in America.
I spent the first 23 years of my life under the self-perpetuated illusion that I had some mental impairment people ignored due to my slight disability. I believed having this meant that each eccentric moment, every ordinary slip or mistake, was a symptom of a problem that no one else acknowledged. Last year, a doctor informed me that my handicap is only physical. Everyone around me wasn’t denying a reality I knew was true.
Shortly after this freeing revelation, my alcoholic father reacted badly to a request to go no-contact, and I sought a restraining order. In his response, my father denied being a threat, and claimed that I made it all up. He attempted to negate a childhood spent fighting him for car keys and being targeted for existing. My dad said I have schizophrenia and histrionic personality disorder. My sister and my mother sent statements in accord. If they all agreed, was I crazy? The judge did not agree with my family. Someone in a position of power believed me. What if she felt that parents have their children’s welfare in mind, and that I fabricated my own past? This is the kind of terror we need in today’s world: less the fear of the monster and more the fear of others’ authority of us and the weakness of our own minds, which I call “societal terror."
In this situation, my parents are like the capricious, self-obsessed counts and lords in Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho. These characters mistreat the naïve heroine Emily from self-interest as much as malice. Most of the fear comes less from the supernatural and more from how people treat Emily. Radcliffe, one of the most popular Gothic authors of the late eighteenth century, defines two ways of invoking sensation in a reader: terror “awakens the faculties,” while horror “annihilates them”. She does not make a distinction between terror that awakens the faculties and that which subjects us to the cruelties of people and psychology. Mysteries more explicitly creates and debunks supernatural terrors; Radcliffe makes use of the fear that comes from relations with others, but in the 18th century this dynamic was the situation in which a friendless young woman inevitably finds herself. Given our more egalitarian world, this is less a given and more a tool to be used. There is a constant note of both original terror and societal terror throughout Gothic novels, and these can be more heavily utilized when we drop other aspects of 18th-century Gothic novels. As life becomes more hectic, how we interpret the world and how we act toward others becomes more vital.
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Strawberry Hill: Walpole's Very Own Gothic Castle
Image Copyright D. Kendall and the English Heritage NMR (1993)
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Per Horace Walpole, the author who first made use of the term Gothic to describe his novel, the genre seeks to subject ordinary people to extraordinary circumstances. It is an attempt to blend two previous genres. “In the former, all was imagination and improbability.” In the latter, Walpole says, “the great resources of fancy have been dammed up, by a strict adherence to common life.” Walpole set his novella The Castle of Otranto in a vaguely foreign place that does not exist, and notes in his first, anonymous preface that the story might have been written during the First Crusades. Here, Walpole created a foundation for other storytelling devices among Gothic authors:
Castle is supposedly a found manuscript. Frankenstein was originally published anonymously like Castle, and it features nested stories, as with The Monk, that permit Mary Shelley and Matthew Lewis to cram a variety of genres into their novels. Like Dracula, Frankenstein uses nothing but journal entries and news articles. These aspects are central to the feel of original Gothic novels, but use of “found” manuscripts and journal entries seems artificial to a population that does not write nearly as much or as personally as the nouveau-learned middle and upper classes in the 18th century. We also do not need as much variety or as many nested stories in a single work, since we can publish at the speed of blog.
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Just look at this convoluted nonsense!
(Image is from my NCUR PowerPoint)
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As Americans, we need to leave behind some of these artificial writing tools, and the collective psychological history borne by British authors of the 18th century. The Gothic architecture that names the genre comes from the Goths who sacked Rome. They represent the seedy underbelly of Europe to which more civilized writers in the 1700s could safely return to find catharsis while class and religion were at a furor around them. Gothic writers turned Catholic authority figures and convents into representations of danger and woe for the same reason: during a time when rationality was supposedly replacing religious and supernatural events, Anglican writers flirted with the mysticism surrounding the Catholic faith, even unto the surviving connection between vampires and crosses. We do not have that sort of tumult here and now; we are more focused on economic and political upheaval than cultural or religious ones. Convents are largely gone, and short of people making vampires out of the Eucharist and the predator priest scandals, religious taboos are less of a focus for us than they were for 18th-century authors. Oppressive Gothic architecture sets the tone—but we have fewer castles in America.
(The full title of this presentation is Alienation and Abominations: Terror and Horror in Classic Gothic Novels and My Own Writing. I cut out the discussion of my own text, since I'll be posting that in chunks here for you. I figure that once I share some of this stuff with the entire internet, simple pieces of unpolished prose will be nothing to worry about.)
I know I've read this before, but it's still great!
ReplyDeleteThe idea of societal terror is incredibly compelling - I can make some comparisons to my own research into mimetic theory, the idea that scapegoating is society deciding to ostracize a minority or otherwise vulnerable group, then inventing the justification afterward. There's nothing the scapegoat can do to alter their fate, because the rationalization of "why" doesn't exist.
It's a great concept, although I do wish you didn't have to encounter it quite so intimately =( .