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The term "Gothic" was coined by Italian Renaissance writers who attributed (blamed, is more like it) what they considered to be the non-classical ugliness of the art and architecture of the mid-12th to 15th centuries to the northern tribes of Germanic barbarians known as the Goths. These dimwits mistakenly hypothesized that the Baron's bloodthirsty berserker ancestors had wrecked destruction upon the "true" art of the Roman Empire after their invasion during the 5th century, corrupting it with a fantastical style characterized by towers that were too tall, walls that were too thick, and arches that were too steeply pointed, the final effect being one of barbarous "confusion". This crackpot theory aside, they were correct in their assessment that the Gothic school of architecture, with its flying buttresses, rib vaulting, pointed arches and the presence of gargoyles on the inside as well as outside the building, created a sublimely gloomy effect on the human mind, one of the mysterious, the grotesque, and the austere.
By the end of the 18th Century the meaning of the word "Gothic" sort of switched from "medieval" to "macabre", all with a little help from a man with a big black lump of coal between his ears named Horace Walpole (1717-1797). The son of the famous politician Sir Robert Walpole, Horace was a well-known writer and dilettante who gradually transformed his simple villa, Strawberry Hill, into the most famous Gothic building of the age. It was there, in a creepy crib replete with pillars, vaults, arches, and a fairy tale tower, that wiggy Horace was visited by a dream that would signal the beginning of a new literary genre:
"I waked one morning in the beginning of last June from a dream, which all I could recover was, that I had thought myself in an ancient castle (a very natural dream for a head filled like mine with Gothic story) and that on the uppermost banister of a great staircase I saw a gigantic hand in armour. In the evening I sat down and began to write, without knowing in the least what I intended to say or relate." Inspired by his little mind-movie vision, Walpole sat down and hashed out The Castle of Otranto, the world's first Gothic novel and without a doubt one of the most influential novels in the history of English literature. |
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The convoluted plot of Otranto - filled to the brim with supernatural occurrences, melodrama, and credulity stretching plot twists - involves usurpation, guilt, treachery, and revenge. Manfred, the prince of the fictional Otranto (a name later co-opted by Lord Byron for his splendid Gothic play Manfred), is determined to continue his royal bloodline after the sudden and bizarre death of his only son Conrad who, on the day of his marriage to the waifish Isabella, has been crushed to death by the fall of a gigantic helmet of unknown origin (I kid you not). In desperation, Manfred plans to divorce his wife and marry the lovely Isabella himself. Less than happy with this arrangement, the young bride-to-be contrives to escape from the brooding, labrythine castle, ending up in the subteranean vaults below. There she finds a handsome and chivalrous youth named Theodore who strangely resembles the portrait of the castle's original lord, Alfonso. Indeed, Theo turns out to be none other than the rightful heir to Otranto.
Meanwhile, various other pieces of enormous armor are popping up on the castle grounds, weird calling cards from the giant ghost of Alfonso who is pissed at Manfred because it was his grandfather who usurped his rightful place as lord. Manfred's wickedness, fueled by his sense of impotence, climaxes with the accidental murder of his own daughter, the noble-hearted Matilda, whom he mistakes for Isabella. Manfred and the castle collapse simultaneously, the spirit of Alfonso goes to heaven, Theodore becomes lord of Otranto and takes Isabella as his bride. A penitent Manfred recognizes his own evil and retires to a monastery for a spiritual life of prayer and meditation.
Horace was happy as a maggot in carrion with the product of his labors, but he feared ridicule for it and so Otranto was unleashed on Christmas Eve of 1764 as the purported translation of an Italian manuscript by one "Onuphrio Muralto". Right from the start, Gothicism was closely connected with architecture, dreams, the mysterious workings of the subconscious, and the eccentricities of its authors. The Castle of Otranto gave us all of the trappings and cliches that defined the Gothic - a literature that speaks in the language of the subconscious - as we know it: the foreboding castle (a symbol of confining narcissism), damp catacombs (generally interpreted by psychologists as representing the subconscious mind itself), trap doors, secret passages, creaking hinges, cobwebs and exstinguished lamps. It also introduced the major Gothic themes: the idea of inherited evil (the son paying for the sins of the father), characters whose physical appearance corresponds with their spiritual state, and, most important of all, the identity of the castle or house with its owner.
Having said all that, the sad fact is that Otranto is a rather tedious, ridiculously overblown novel, written in a prose style that is WAY to playful and upbeat to create any real sense of dread and menace. Walpole belted this puppy out in a white heat... and it shows. In the end, it's really only of interest to scholars and Goth-o-philes who are interested in the minutia of the origins of Gothic culture. Like Sigmund Freud, Horace may not be the best in his field, but he was also the first in his field. It's a safe bet to say that if Walpole hadn't invented Goth in 1764 that some other twitch with a morbid imagination would have come along and done it a decade or two later, but he was the one who had the unique honor of being the one to open the floodgates. |
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The "twentieth century's dark prince of horror", H.P. Lovecraft, offers a quick capsulization of Gothic literature's most generic traits: "This novel dramatic paraphernalia consisted first of all of the Gothic castle, with its awesome antiquity, vast distances and ramblings, deserted or ruined wings, damp corridors, unwholesome hidden catacombs, and galaxy of ghosts and appalling legends, as a nucleus of suspense and daemonic fright. In addition, it included the tyrannical and malevolent nobleman as villain; the saintly, long-persecuted, and generally inspipid heroine who undergoes the major terrors and serves as a point of view and focus for the readers sympathies; the valorous and immaculate hero, always of high birth but often in humble disguise... and the infinite array of stage properties which includes strange lights, damp trapdoors, exstinguished lamps, mouldy hidden manuscripts, creaking hinges, shaking arras, and the like." |
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William Beckford (1760-1844) was another wealthy English kook with literary ambitions and enough money with which to indulge his own Gothy whims. He built a Strawberry Hill of his own, named Fonthill Abbey, which boasted the tallest tower in all of England and a surrounding wall twelve feet in height. After a remarkable education (that included piano lessons from Mozart!) he became a notorious hedonist, was made infamous by a score of unsavory scandals, and ultimately confined himself to Fonthill Abbey to live the reclusive life of a "Gothick hero". Inspired by Otranto and Galland's Thousand and One Nights, Beckford wrote The History of Caliph Vathek, An Arabian Tale... in French, which is translator published against his will in 1786.
Beckford created a fictional stand-in for himself in the character of Vathek, a jaded sensualist plagued by inexorable ennui after having seen, heard, felt and done it all (or so he thinks!). Tempted by a mysterious Indian with the promise of acquiring Solomon's talisman, Vathek is encouraged by his sorcerous mother into committing and escalating series of heinous acts in this pursuit, culminating in his Gilles De Rais-ish slaughter of fifty children as a sacrifice to Devil. At last, the wicked Caliph manages to gain ingress into the subterranean black palace of Eblis, only to find himself punished for his myriad "unrestrained passions and atrocious deeds" by having his heart eternally encircled with living fire.
Evocative of the mystery and wonder associated with the Orient, Vathek embodied Beckford's notorious hedonism, his separation of aesthetic from ethical considerations, and his gleeful pleasure in going against the mores of conventional society. It introduced what would be two of the major themes in the Gothic: the Faustian pursuit if forbidden knowledge and the dilemma of innocence that relies on ignorance. It also established startling symbolic imagery, such as the literally burning hearts of the damned. Embodying Beckford's notorious hedonism, his separation of the aesthetic from ethical considerations, it is a work that contained a variety of foreboding and incendiary ideas. Evil was increasingly being seen as relative, and it wasn't long before its pleasures were being explored. Oh yeah. |
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