Gothic Literature: Gothic Writing Style

Gothic Literature is a writing style that combines the elements of Romanticism, such as individuality and high passions, with situations of fear and suspense. This subgenre of Romantic Literature uses emotion as a technique to create metaphorical gender coding. By presenting overflowing emotions as a living or animated experience, characters in a Gothic work are given an additional layer of traits. According to Nicola Trott, the sublime is associated with masculinity by providing massive strength and size that induces terror. Sublimity creates terror through obscurity and uncertainty of potentially, irrationally terrible situations, such as murder or rape. Terror being gendered as feminine, allows Gothic works such as the The Monk by Matthew Gregory Lewis to complicate the gender and identity of his characters with the aforementioned terror. Murder and rape in The Monk are emphasized, because they create an irrational, immobilizing sense of terror. Ann Radcliffe describes terror as the appropriate method by which sublimity is achieved. While horror is mentioned in The Monk and by Radcliffe, the Gothic

This subgenre of Romantic Literature uses emotion as a technique to create metaphorical gender coding. By presenting overflowing emotions as a living or animated experience, characters in a Gothic work are given an additional layer of traits. According to Nicola Trott, the sublime is associated with masculinity by providing massive strength and size that induces terror. Sublimity creates terror through obscurity and uncertainty of potentially, irrationally terrible situations, such as murder or rape. Terror being gendered as feminine, allows Gothic works such as the The Monk by Matthew Gregory Lewis to complicate the gender and identity of his characters with the aforementioned