In the 19th century, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Edgar Allan Poe were known for their use of gothic elements in their types of writing. The plot of gothic literature novels typically involves people who become involved in complex and oftentimes evil paranormal schemes, usually against an innocent and helpless heroine. Poe used gothic dimensions to explore the human mind in extreme situations. Hawthorne examined the human heart under conditions of fear, vanity, mistrust, and betrayal. Even though Hawthorne and Poe used the gothic elements, they still used different types of darkness to portray their writing to the reader.
The Woman in Black is a novel that was written by Susan Hill in the attempt to imitate gothic literature in the late 18th century. In doing this she hopes to terrify and intrigue the reader with various techniques in which I will go through over the course of this essay. By using this methods she attempts to amplify the feelings of the atmosphere and create a weary environment filled with tension and suspense. Various traditional gothic techniques are used, in order to gain a sense of fear and insecurity. The author, Susan Hill, attempts to balance gothic ideas, like pathetic fallacy, with gothic literary devices, such as short sentences and repetition to maintain the readers full divided attention.
PSYART.com) Pre-modern day gothic writers wrote about psychological issues hundreds of years before professionals addressed mental illnesses, by extension shows that gothic writers helped popularize and influenced the study of psychology. The connotation of the word "gothic" carries the stigma of the emotion melancholy and the grotesque. ("Stigma, n." OED Online, Oxford University Press, June 2017, www.oed.com/viewdictionaryentry/Entry/190242. Accessed 16 November 2017.) Humanitarians and those alike tend to believe that the Gothic genre is to showcase the darker side of people, the subconscious being of humans.
The term gothic novel refers to stories that combine romanticism and horror. Common elements include supernatural events, mysterious places, and strange happenings. The Veldt also touched on overdependence of technology. Some famous novels include Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and Dracula.
The Gothic Influence Although the word “Gothic” is often associated with supernatural creatures or haunted, abandoned places, the word actually originates from an elaborate style of architecture. The reason that the word “Gothic” has become associated with these ideas of horror and death is because the architecture was thought of the ideal place for mysterious, suspenseful, and dark stories to occur. These types of stories became known as the Gothic genre. The Gothic literary genre often includes elements of fear, death, and strong emotions, and is set in set in a dark or mysterious place.
The Portrayal of Gothic Elements in A Sicilian Romance 2.3.1 The Setting Radcliffe wrote A Sicilian Romance after visiting the beautiful Island of Sicily. She was fascinated by the magnificent remains of a castle which belongs to the house of Mazzini . In the preface of A Sicilian Romance , she describes her journey and how these places inspired her to write about the past time when these ruins were enormous buildings teeming with life : As I walked over the loose fragments of stones which lay scattered through the immense area of the fabric, and surveyed the sublimity and grandeur of the ruins, I recurred, by a natural associations of ideas, to the times when these walls stood proudly in their original splendor, when the halls were the scenes of hospitality and festive magnificent, and when they resounded with the voices of those whom death had long since death swept from the earth.
Gothic literature is a style of literature that takes place in the past, most of the time it has someone who dies and it has a creepy vibe/tone behind it . Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher,” is a good example of Gothic literature because it shows how a man goes to visit an old friend and see how his friend and his friends twin sister die. “The whole of a dull, dark, and soundless day. ”(13)
Why does gothic horror even matter in literature? Gothic horror can create numerous ideas found within a novel more interesting or suspenseful about what will happen next. These stories use different characteristics to create a gothic atmosphere in the story. During the Victorian era, the idea of gothic literature grew in popularity. It is influenced by countless ideas, including religious themes around this time period, and usually reflects on the characteristics of the people living in the Victorian era.
Gothic Literature is a genre that was popular between 18th to 19th centuries in North Germany. It is always being associated with Dark Romanticism which the emphasize was more on nature, terror and death, horror and many more. It involves dark and gloomy setting and also unexplainable things that are beyond human senses and reason such as ghosts and monsters. The main characters, on the other hand, are always ineffectual which they do not give much effect on the story plot. This can be seen through Washington Irving’s “Rip van Winkle” and “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” which can be considered as American gothic work in terms of its description of setting, the involvement of supernatural element in the story and also the characteristics of the main character.
The earlier gothic works as well as Dracula covered something that is outside the social norm. Female sexuality, something that was unacceptable and under the surface of society, it is exposed in these writings. The earlier readings such as Carmilla, as well as the poem of Christabel question the boundaries. The texts from these literature pieces contain passages of female sexuality and the passages contain phrases that hint towards the social taboos. In the era when women were thought of mere objects these pieces decide to give them a personality or at least a voice that can express desire, a voice that states women have a purpose apart from pleasing men.
Gothic Elements in the “The Tell Tale Heart” The classic short story of “The Tell-Tale Heart”, written by one of the all time masters of horror, Edgar Allen Poe, has always been used as an excellent example of Gothic fiction. Edgar Allen Poe specialized in the art of gothic writing and wrote many stories that portrayed disturbing events and delved deeply into the minds of its characters. In "The Tell-Tale Heart," Poe revolves the plot around a raving individual who, insisting that he is sane, murders an old man because of his` “vulture eye”. The three main gothic elements that are evident in this story are the unique setting, the theme of death and decay, and the presence of madness.
Gothic is set as the mood and tone of this story. The gothic elements are the haunted house, the dull landscape, and the mysterious illness. The mood and the tone have some difference in this story. The mood that a reader can see it as is mysterious. The tone is how the writer feels towards what he is writing, in the story we see the changes in the tone.
They seem simple, basic enough to the modern eye that one can barely take them seriously, it is not until we put ourselves into the shoes of an everyday London labourer that we begin to see the effects that these pieces could have had on people (Canny 55). Similarly, it is a strange experience to read a piece of gothic literature such as The Castle of Otranto and be told that it is in fact a horror story, as some may have read it and mistaken it for an early adventure into black comedy. While the language and imagery during the Depositions and Temple’s work are basic and almost primitive, it is difficult to deny that they have not inspired and been improved upon in future titles that we would eventually come to call gothic
While Desdemona is a remarkably strong character, Emilia also displays independence unmatched by any other female in Othello, and there are multiple details of Shakespeare and his time that may have prompted such a portrayal. In Elizabethan England, many women worked behind the scenes of productions, like Shakespeare’s, as uncredited authors and editors (Crowley). Due to their anonymity, nobody can be sure that women were involved in Shakespeare’s plays nor Othello in particular, but there is a genuine possibility that female writers did have leverage. This may have had to do with how Emilia was portrayed as resilient from the time of Desdemona’s death all the way until her own, standing up for herself regardless of the ridicule it caused her (Iyasere). In fact, it even killed her in the end.
In the early 18th century a new genre of fiction prose, named "Gothic Novel" was introduced. The term ”Gothic” used to refer to the German tribe of the Goths. The Gothic novel spread over the 19th century and had the popular theme of haunted places such as castles, crypts, gloomy monasteries; supernatural elements having the role to intensify the atmosphere. The characteristic motifs of the gothic genre were the strange places, the supernatural, magic objects, monsters, demons, science used for bad purposes. And many of them appear also in "The Picture of Dorian Gray".
