Origins of the Gothic in Literature, part 2

by Baron Wolfgang von Schreck

One of the most influential and wildly popular of the early Gothic authors was Anne Radcliffe (1764-1823), a lady who drew the contrast between "terror" and "horror", the latter being defined as the fear of some visible menace, whereas the former is a subtler (and more difficult to evoke) sensation: the fear of the unseen. Unfortunately, in all of her major novels (such as The Mysteries of Udolpho and The Italian) the supernatural is always explained away as being the result of human skullduggery; so, while they continually suggest the irrational, they very much reaffirm the rational and the status quo. Finishing one of Radcliffe's novels can't help but leave you feeling cheated, left with that same let down feeling you had as a kid watching Scooby Doo, when some peckerhead sheriff would pull a rubber mask off the monster and the surly, scowling man underneath would grumble: "...and I'd have gotten away with it too if it weren't for those meddling kids!" Only in her posthumous novel Gaston de Blondville does an honest to badness ghost rear its spectral head. Snore.


Despite the wide acceptance of her colorful novels, not all were content to follow in Ms. Radcliffe's pen strokes. In fact, some writers saw this new trend as a threat to the Gothic tale's original intentions. Gregory Mathew Lewis (1775-1818) reacted to the soft sublimity of Radcliffe with stark, visceral, balls-out horror. His contribution to the field, The Monk (1797), completed in a mere ten weeks when he was a baby-faced nineteen year old. A forthright assault on Radcliffe's watered-down incarnation of the Gothic novel and a powerful influence on the wave of Black Romanticism to come, The Monk gives us murder, rape, incest, black magic and special guest appearances by the Wandering Jew, a fearsome apparition called the Bleeding Nun, and none other than Old Scratch himself. Lewis knew instinctively that Gothicism was never meant to be subtle. Just like an old Black Sabbath album, it was meant to be cranked at ear-splitting decibels.

The Monk is the tawdry tale of human passions being carried to their brain- scorching, soul-searing extremes. The motivation of the doomed hero, a Capuchin monk named Ambrosio, is not for power, wealth, property or even lust, but the lust for lust. After spending thirty years of monotonous virtue in the humdrum sanctity of a monasterey, Ambrosio finds himself yielding to the enticements of a beautiful young novice, Matilda. But lurking beneath the fair visage of Matilda is an evil spirit who impels the tormented monk to commit a series of evil deeds, including the rape and murder of one of his penitents, the pure and virtuous Antonia, who turns out to be his own sister.

His evil deeds finally exposed, Ambrosio is tried and tortured by the Inquisition for his crimes, but he is ironically and inexplicably pardoned at the last minute, since his master the Devil has a more sinister fate in store for him. Lucifer takes it upon himself to personally swoop down on the hapless Ambrosio, lifting him up and carrying him through the sky... and then dropping the cassock-wearing bastard on some sharp rocks below. His death struggle takes exactly six days (during which time his living body is torn apart by eagles), paralleling the creation of the world. On the seventh day his mangled corpse is washed out to sea.

Like Otranto, The Monk presented evil as sexual obsession, compounded by overwhelming guilt or pride that defy the limits that God has set for man. The forthright sexual descriptions and twisted exploits of the shuddering sinner Ambrosio, who watches his own spiraling descent into evil with helpless agony, provoked one writer to call the book "a most notorious exemplar of the 'Gothic' school of romance." "Never was such a clamour, such an outcry heard since Troy fell," declared noted occultist Rev. Montague Summers. "...at the noise one might have believed that the very pillars of religion and decency were being shaken to the dust."

It was Lewis who set the Gothic back on the right track, plotting the course for the next century and that famous night in Geneva in June of 1816, when George Gordon Lord Byron entertained his friend Percy Shelley, his lover Mary Wollstonecraft and Dr. John Polidori at Villa Diodati and proposed that each of them undertake the writing of a ghost story. Some days later young Mary would lay down, close her eyes and have a vision of a "...pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing that he had put together." Two years later Polidori would put pen to paper and create The Vampyre: A Tale, the sanguine saga of a brilliant, aloof nobleman, elegantly evil and utterly irresistible to women. The Gothic was now well on its way from being a morbid literary fad to the shambling, immortal, indestructable monster that we know and loathe today.

(Note: While the novels of Walpole, Beckford, Radcliffe and Lewis can be seen as the first principle works of Gothic literature, the germs from which they sprang can certainly be said to be graveyard poetry (particularly that of William Cowper and Thomas Gray) and the Sentimental novel, which highlighted the internal workings of the "man and woman of feeling." But while the Sentimental novel was all about Virtue, the Gothic novel's main interest lay in Vice.)

The Baron's Gothic Lit Pick List

Below I've included a brief list of some favorites and recommendations, from the old to the fairly recent, with which to further your education. I PITY THE GOTH who hasn't read these! I PITY THE (WO)MAN!

1. Paradise Lost (1667) by John Milton. An awe-inspiring proto-Gothic epic poem about a sympathetic Lucifer's rebellion against "the tyrany of Heaven" and the hapless bi-peds who get caught in the middle of the battle.

2. The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774) by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Boy meets girl, boy falls in love with girl, girl doesn't fall in love with boy, boy shoots himself in the temple, his head swells to the size of a basketball, and he dies days later. Morrissey had nothing on this guy. This outrageously popular novel from the "Sentimentalist" school about the quintessential "Man of Feeling" inspired a rash of real suicides all through Europe. And you thought Judas Priest records were deadly! Yikes!

3. Christabel (1798) by S.T. Coleridge. An unfinished, eerily erotic poem that introduced the Lesbian Vampire archetype later defined in J. Sheridan Le Fanu's superb 1872 novella Carmilla. Sure to produce a hard and/or wet spot in the laps of every Darkling. Mmmmmmmmm-MHM!

4. Frankenstein (1818) by Mary Shelley. Unlike its sibling Dracula, this is actually a deeply compelling and well crafted novel (written by its author at the ripe old age of nineteen). The fact that the Monster educates himself by reading Werther and Paradise Lost is hardly a coincidence.

5. The Vampyre: A Tale (1819) by John Polidori. No, this ain't no masterpiece, but with his striking depiction of the handsome but wicked Lord Ruthven (who enjoys ruining the lives of the virtuous and enabling the profligate poor to sink even deeper into sin), Polidori firmly established the literary vampire type later immortilzed by Bram Stoker.

6. Carmilla (1872) by J. Sheridan Le Fanu. With his unforgettable portrayal of the seemingly pure and innocent vampiress Countess Mircalla Karnstein ("Carmilla" is an anagram for her first name"), Le Fanu did for the lesbian vampire what Stoker would do for the vampire nobleman.

7. The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891) by Oscar Wilde. Wilde's best and most famous work (whose plot hardly requires recounting here). A disquisition on aesthetics, decadence and the spiritually corrupting nature of Vanity.

8. Dracula (1897) by Bram Stoker. Included here more for its historical significance and influence than its quality. The good Count himself appears in only about fifty pages of this four-hundred page snooze-fest. Still, its highlights (i.e. Dracula's brides salivating over a possum-playing Harker, Renfield woofing down a bird and vomitting up its blood and feathers, the voyage of the doomed ship the Demeter) are truly unforgettable moments.

9. The Turn of the Screw (1898) by Henry James. Masterful mind-fuck about a not altogether bright Governess who tries to protect two innocent children from a pair of malevolent spirits. But are the ghosts real or are they merely products of the Governess' sexually repressed mind? Just when you think you know either way and you know where you stand, James pulls the rug out from under your feet and drops you flat on your ass. A tour de force of Gothic technique, deftly handled and with telling effect.

10. I Am Legend (1954) by Richard Matheson. The author of The Shrinking Man and most of the best episodes of the old Twilight Zone series wrote this skin- crawling yarn about a lone man trapped in a world of vampires hungry for his blood. This masterwork not only created the Apocolyptic horror genre, gave rise to two film adaptations (The Last Man on Earth and The Omega Man) and inspired Night of the Living Dead and The Stand, it loaded the horrors of Transylvania into a U-Haul and moved them to the suburbs.

11. The Haunting of Hill House (1959) by Shirley Jackson. Four strangers spend some time in the mother of all haunted houses - a huge, sprawling, mansion constructed at odd, disorienting angles. Spooky banging sounds manifest themselves, eerie cold spots are discovered, clothes are drenched in blood and ripped to shreds, but the real horror emerges in a natural attraction between the damned domicile and one of its guests. "Journies end in lovers meeting..."

12. The Best of H.P. Lovecraft: Bloodcurdling Tales of Horror and the Macabre (1963) by H.P. Lovecraft. 20th Century Gothic horror begins and ends with H.P.L., the end-all-be-all master of the genre, and this anthology threads together his finest short stories and novellas (such as "The Rats in the Walls", "The Dunwich Horror" and "The Call of Cthulu") into a string of gleaming black pearls.

13. Interview with the Vampire (1976) by Anne Rice. Ground-breaking and surprisingly touching "re-vamp" of the immortal bloodsucker myth, using vampires as stand-ins for the chronically depressed and vampirism as a metaphor for the drug addiction they fall into to escape their pain.