There are many facets and
aspects to gothic writing which are considered defining of the genre. Terror, sexuality, depiction of the senses
and the ever-present suspense are all parts of the gothic mode. These mediums are all used to the extreme, or
as Becker put it in 1999, “excess: excess in moral terms, excess of realism
into the supernatural, [and] formal excess”.
According to Botting in Gothic,
he agrees that the gothic mode signifies a writing of excess, and further goes
to explain that it shows itself in the obscurity that plagued
eighteenth-century morality and rationality, shadowing the romanticised
pleasures of idealism and individuality while at the same time making use of
the gluttony of the Victorian era.[1] This view and concept of the excess of the
gothic mode will be discussed in relation to the first of the gothic novels, The Castle of Otranto, and to the poem The Eve of St Agnes, looking at the
examples of these types of excess in these specific literary works.
To begin, this essay shall
examine The Castle
of Otranto, as it is regarded as the first work of gothic literature, and
the defining and influential standard for the genre. The Castle of Otranto by Horace Walpole is the
story of a man, Manfred, who lives in a castle with his wife, daughter, and son
whom is shortly to be wed. The opening
of the book provides a perfect starting example of the excess that is used in gothic
writing. Within the first 3 pages of the
story, Manfred’s son, Conrad, is found to have been violently killed, and the
scene is described with Manfred finding “his child dashed to pieces, and almost
buried under an enormous helmet, an hundred times more large than any casque
ever made for human beings, and shaded with a proportionable quantity of black
feathers”.[2] This excerpt contains clear examples of
excess in realism, where the description of the dashing to pieces of the son is
described, excess in the size of the helmet that did the crushing, and excess
in the amount of black that is used for the feathering on the helmet. It is recognised that this was written in
this manner to convey a sense of grandiose presence and as a shock for the
readers of the late eighteenth-century.
Continuing on further in The Castle of Otranto, more examples of
the excess in the gothic nature can be found, specifically of the morally
depraved kind. A few pages further from
where Manfred discovered his son dashed to pieces on his wedding day, he
devises a plan to secure himself another male heir. Manfred calls the young girl Isabella whom
was to wed Conrad, to his chambers.
Isabella goes thinking that Manfred wants to talk to her about Conrad
and seek some sort of comfort, but Manfred quickly reveals that he plans to
divorce his wife than night so that he can take Isabella as his new wife, as
she is young and beautiful and can bare him many sons. Further, Manfred continues in his
debauchery-driven self-deprecation of his moral character by explaining that
his love of his son was misplaced as Conrad was a sickly child and would not
have been fit to carry on his line nor be worthy of Isabella herself and
proceeds to throw himself at her, causing her to flee.[3] This is a clear example of the degree of
depravation that is depicted in the gothic mode, which was clearly written to
go beyond the normal proper British standard of literature of the day and was
meant to provoke actual emotion and passion in the readers.[4] This need to invoke an emotional response in
the readers and populace of the time could have been due to the restrictive
nature of the church and the way that it portrayed sex, drugs, and anything
else that it did not like at this time in history, and the people feeling a
need to express themselves. Frank agrees
with this observation in his introduction that he wrote in a 2003 edition of The Castle of Otranto & The Mysterious
Mother, which he also edited. Frank
said that “Walpole’s
purpose in both his architectural and literary Gothicizing was to secure
freedom from the ennui and malaise engendered by neoclassic order and form.”[5] It appears then that the motivation behind
Walpole writing The Castle of Otranto
was that the current Victorian, or neoclassical works available were too dry,
routine, and boring; lacking in substance that would engage and challenge the
current population in Europe to think differently and to become emotionally
invested in what they were reading. In
order to illicit a substantial response, Walpole poured as much excess of moral
depravity, supernatural haunting, scandal, and suspense as he could into the
short story, and in turn, and quite accidentally, created an entire genre that
focused on the supernatural, the emotion, the senses and feelings.
More examples of the scope
of excess used in the gothic mode can be found in the poem The Eve of St Agnes. This
poem is the tale of how a man named Porphyro steals his way into a church
during a holy ceremony for young virgin women who are hoping to see a vision of
their future husband, and spies upon and then takes advantage of a young maiden
named Madeline, which he loves but cannot be with due to feuding houses, much
like Romeo and Juliet.[6] The excess that is depicted in this poem is
mostly of a sensory and of a sexual nature, most likely to try and play-on, and
provoke, the stronger senses and emotions in a person, which holds with the
previous stated purpose behind the gothic mode being to pull the populace out
of a dull existence and create emotional responses.
The poem opens with a
two-stanza long description of the cold; over-emphasizing the degree to which
the low temperature was felt, seemingly in order to help once again to draw on
the senses of the readers and try to spark emotional connections and a true
perception and feeling of the atmosphere.[7] Phrases such as ‘bitter chill’, ‘frozen
grass’, ‘frosted breath’, and ‘icy hoods’ all serve to help instil the sense of
a deep, cold winter night for the reader, void of warmth and comfort.[8] This is then met with a contradiction to the
senses by the warmth and comfort of being inside depicted in the lines that
follow which describe Madeline’s preparation within the church for the ritual
of St Agnes.[9] Again, there are lines spent depicting the
scene which are heavily dependant on the senses, using the alliteration of
‘music’s gold tounge’ and ‘silver, snarling trumpets’ which show an excess of
activity during the preparations for this holy rite.[10]
The excess that is used in The Eve of St Agnes is not confined to
just the sensations created by the weather, though. Another example is the sexual content and
tension that exist within Porphyro and is the resulting cause of his deception
to Madeline in her bedchamber.[11] From the moment that he steals himself away
into Madeline’s closet and watches her slowly undress, until the time that he
‘melts into her dream’[12],
this poem displays an excessive amount of sexually oriented content that was,
once again as stated previously, most likely written to shock the readers into
having some response and move out of their nineteenth-century comfort
zone.
Thus with a close
examination of these two examples of gothic literature, and focusing on only a
few of the aspects that define the genre, it can be demonstrated that Becker’s
view of the gothic mode being explained as excess is well founded. The excessive size of the armour in The Castle of Otranto, the sexual
depravity displayed by Manfred and the resulting death of his own daughter and
loss of his kingdom because of it, coupled with the extremes that Keats goes to
in The Eve of St Agnes to describe
the sensations of cold and warmth, and the sensual sexuality of the
interactions between Madeline and Porphyro within the bedchamber go far in
proving that the gothic mode was developed specifically to stir up feelings and
emotions in the readers, and does so using excess in all things.
Bibliography
Botting, F. (2007).
Gothic. Routledge,
New York.
Frank,
F. (2003). The Castle of Otranto & The Mysterious Mother by
Horace Walpole. National Library of Canada, Toronto.
Keats, J. (1819-1820).
The Eve of St Agnes. ENG211 Reading
05, 2007.
Shakespeare,
W. (1980). Shakespeare:
The Complete Works, (edited by G. B. Harrison). Harcourt
Brace College
Publishers, Orlando.
Walpole, W. (2008).
The Castle of Otranto, (edited
by W. S. Lewis). Oxford
University Press, Oxford.
[1] Botting,
Gothic, pg. 1-3
[2] Walpole,
The Castle of Otranto,
pg. 19
[3] Ibid,
pg. 24-26
[4] Botting,
Gothic, pg. 3
[5] Frank, The Castle of Otranto & The Mysterious
Mother, pg 12
[6]
Shakespeare, The Tragedy of Romeo and
Juliet, pg. 468-511
[7] Keats, The Eve of St Agnes, Line 1-18
[8] Ibid
[9] Ibid,
Line 28-54
[10] Ibid
[11] Ibid,
Line 163-352
[12] Ibid,
Line 320
No comments:
Post a Comment