North American Literature

Fred Botting Gothic.1

Introduction: Gothic excess and transgression

Excess
Gothic is a writing of excess that appears in the atrocious darkness that surrounds morality.
and the rationality of the eighteenth century. This writing casts a shadow over the hopeless ecstasies
of romantic idealism and individualism and about the mysterious dualities of realism and
Victorian decadentism. Gothic atmospheres have repeatedly highlighted the disturbing
return from the past about the present. In the twentieth century, in various and ambiguous ways, the figures
gothic stories have continued to darken the progress of modernity with counter-narratives that
they display the other side (the 'dark' side) of the Enlightenment and humanist values. The Gothic
condense the threats to those values, threats that are associated with natural forces and
supernatural, imaginative excesses and disappointments, religious and human evil, social transgression,
mental disintegration and spiritual corruption. Gothic writing focuses on objects and practices that
are considered negative, irrational, immoral, and fantastic.
In Gothic fiction, certain types of traits provide the main incarnations and
evocations of cultural concerns. Tortuous fragmented narratives that recount
mysterious incidents, horrific images and life-threatening pursuits are frequent in
the eighteenth century. In this type of fiction, certain types of figures such as specters predominate,
monsters, demons, corpses, skeletons, evil aristocrats, monks and nuns, heroines
fainting and bandits. In the 19th century, other figures such as scientists, fathers, husbands are added,
crazy people and criminals. In the 18th century, the predominant places in this fiction are the sites
wild and mountainous. Then, the central place is occupied by the modern city combined with the
natural and architectural components of Gothic excess and its darkness.
The main site of Gothic intrigues, the castle, predominates in early Gothic fiction.
This space is associated with other medieval buildings (monasteries, abbeys, churches and
cemeteries) that, in their generalized state of ruins, refer to a feudal past associated with the
barbarism, superstition, and fear. Architecture (especially medieval) marks the separation
temporal and spatial of the past and its values compared to those of the present. The delight of horror and terror
they come from the reappearance of figures that disappeared a long time ago. The gothic narrative does not escape from
the concerns of their own time. In later fiction, the castle gradually gives way to
the old family house that becomes the place where fears and worries return in
the present. These anxieties vary according to various changes, be it political revolution,
industrialization, urbanization, transformations in sexual and domestic life or discoveries
scientists.
In Gothic productions, the effects of imagination and emotions exceed those of
reason. Passion, excitement, and sensation transgress social correctness and moral laws.
Ambiguity and uncertainty obscure simple meanings. Gothic implies a
overabundance of imaginative frenzy, untamed by reason and free from conventions
demands for simplicity, realism, and probability of the 18th century. The overreach, as well as the
The over-ornamentation of the Gothic style relates to its intention to depart from the rules.
neoclassical aesthetics and their insistence on clarity and symmetry. Gothic manifests a tendency
to the aesthetics that are based on feeling and emotion and that are associated with 'the sublime',
concept that constitutes the largest area of debate among writers and taste theorists during the
18th century.

1
Rutledge, London and New York, 1996. Translation and summary by Andrea Krikún.
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Gothic produces emotional effects on its readers instead of developing a response.

rational. Attacked in the second half of the 18th century for encouraging excessive emotions and strengthening
illicit passions, Gothic texts have also been seen as subversive in their treatment of
the ways in which good social behavior is supported. Presenting a past that the century
XVIII conceived as barbaric and uncivilized, Gothic fictions seem to promote vice and
violence, giving free rein to personal ambitions and sexual desires beyond the
prescriptions of the law or family duty. From the skeletons that emerge from the closets
relatives and the erotic and sometimes incestuous tendencies of the gothic villains emerge the
spectrum of complete social disintegration in which virtue yields to vice, reason to
desire and the law in the face of tyranny. The uncertainties regarding the nature of power, the law, the
society, family, and sexuality abound in Gothic fiction and are linked to the threat
of disintegration manifested forcefully in the political revolution. The decade of the
The French Revolution was also the period when the Gothic novel was most popular.
Throughout the development of Gothic fiction, a certain ambivalence takes place. While
the old castles and the malevolent aristocrats that appear in this fiction seem to adapt to
Enlightenment model by identifying the Gothic with the tyranny and barbarism of the feudal era, the distance
The rationale of past forms of power, nonetheless, is contradicted by fascination.
through the architecture, customs, and values of the Middle Ages. Gothic novels seem to present
A certain nostalgia for a lost era of romance and adventure, for a world that, although it appears as
barbaric, has, from the perspective of the 18th century, also an order. In this sense, fiction
Gothic preserves old traditions instead of attacking the aristocratic legacy of feudalism. But for
another part, these narratives are marked by the values of family, domesticity and the
virtuous sentimentalism, appropriate values for the middle-class readers who composed the
the majority of the literary market of the eighteenth century. The aristocratic anecdotes of chivalry and
romance is subsumed under the bourgeois values of virtue, merit, and property within the
limits of reason and individualism. Concerns about the past and its forms of power
they are projected onto the evil and villainous aristocrats in order to consolidate the supremacy of values
from the middle class. In 19th-century Gothic fiction, the anecdotes of the aristocracy and the castles
give rise to narratives whose action focuses on urban, domestic, and commercial sites and figures.
professionals. The aristocratic excess, although still evident, is generally replaced by
other forms of threat.
Transgression
The excesses and ambivalences associated with Gothic figures were considered as
signs of transgression. Aesthetically excessive, Gothic productions were considered
unnatural in their undermining of the physical laws by presenting wonderful beings
fantastic events that transgressed the limits of reality and possibility and therefore
they challenged reason.
Gothic fictions present different worlds in which the heroines can find
not only a violence that frightens but also an adventurous freedom. The artificiality of the narratives
they imagine other worlds and also challenge the forms of nature and reality defended by
the social and domestic ideology of the eighteenth century.

Gothic transgression is ambivalent in its causes and effects. It is not only a way of
producing excessive emotion or a celebration of transgression for its own sake but also
activates a sense of the unknown and projects an uncontrollable and overwhelming power that threatens not
not only with the loss of health, honor, property, or social reputation but also of
greater order on which these are based and which is regulated by the coherence of those terms. The
Gothic writing becomes a powerful means to reaffirm the values of society, the
virtue and property: transgression, by crossing aesthetic and social boundaries, serves to reinforce
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to underscore its value or need by restoring or defining the limits. Gothic novels
they often adopt this strategy, warning of the danger of social and moral transgression to
to present it in its darkest and most threatening forms. Thus, this type of fiction serves to reaffirm
self-identity: by escaping from places of threat, the heroes and heroines, with whom one
the reader identifies, they return to the security of the known order and reaffirm their belonging.
political texts from 1790, such as Burke's Reflections, the construction of excesses
revolutionaries as a terrifying monster is used to define the threat and legitimize its
repression and exclusion since terror evokes cathartic emotions and facilitates the expulsion of the object
of fear. Good is affirmed from the contrast with evil and light and reason triumph over the
darkness and superstition. In the context of the eighteenth century, Gothic writing is less a
unrestrained celebration of the excesses that an examination of the limits produced in this century for
distinguish good from evil, the reason of passion, and virtue from vice. The images of light and the
darkness, in its duality, focuses on the acceptable and unacceptable sides of the limits that regulate the
social distinctions.
In the demonstration of the forms and effects of evil under the sign of terror, the line between
transgression and restitution of acceptable limits becomes difficult to discern. This undermines the
project to reach and set safe limits and leaves Gothic texts open to a play of
ambivalences, to a dynamic of limit and transgression where both restore and challenge the
limits. This game of terms, of oppositions, actually characterizes the ambivalence of fiction.
Gothic: the good depends on the evil, the light on the darkness, the reason on the irrationality in the pursuit of definition.
Limits. This means that Gothic is neither a writing of darkness nor of light, nor of reason.
and morality, neither of superstition nor of corruption; it is neither a delineation of good nor of evil but of
both at the same time. The relationships between the real and the fantastic, the sacred and the profane, the natural
and the supernatural, the past and the present, civilization and barbarism, reason and fantasy are
crucial for the dynamics of boundaries and transgression of the Gothic.
Drawing on various literary forms, Gothic fictions oscillate between the categories of
novel and romance. Considered a serious threat to social and literary values, these
fictions were despised and considered a useless waste of time. While their images of
dark powers and mysteries produced fear and anxiety, their absurdity also provoked laughter and
ridiculous. The emotions associated with gothic fictions were also ambivalent: the objects
horror and terror not only provoked disgust and repulsion, but also compromised interest
of the readers fascinating and attracting them. The threats were combined with emotions, the
terrors with delights, horrors with pleasures. Terror was associated with subjective elevation.
with the pleasures of the imagination that exceeded or transcended fear, and therefore with the
renewal and exaltation of a sense of belonging and social values: threatened with the
dissolution, this sense of the self (just like social boundaries) reconstituted their identity in
opposition to otherness and to loss presented at the moment of terror. The subjective elevation
at the moment of terror, it was thus exciting and pleasurable, elevating one's own through
emotional outbursts that simultaneously excluded the reason for fear.
While the terms 'terror' and 'horror' have often been used as synonyms, they can
making distinctions between the two as complementary aspects of emotional ambivalence of
Gothic. If terror leads to an imaginative expansion of the sense of the self, horror describes
the movement of contraction and retraction. Like the dilation of the pupil in moments of
excitement and fear, terror signifies the emotion that elevates while horror distinguishes a
contraction in the face of the imminence and inevitability of the threat. Terror expels the invasion of
visions of horror reconstituting the boundaries that horror has seen disappear. The movement
between terror and horror is part of a dynamic whose poles trace the extension and the different
directions of Gothic projects. These poles, always inextricably linked,
they include the externalization or internalization of fear or anxiety objects. The different
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implicit movements in terror and in horror characterize the most important change in the
gender. In the eighteenth century, the emphasis was placed on expelling and objectifying threatening figures
of darkness and evil casting them out and restoring the very boundaries: the villains were punished
and the heroines ended up well married. In the 19th century, the safety and stability of the structures
social, political, and aesthetic were much more uncertain. In the changing political conditions
philosophical ideas that accompanied the French Revolution all the hierarchies and differences that
they governed the social and economic structures were questioned. The gothic castles, the
villains and ghosts, now turned into clichés and formulas by popular imitation, stopped
to provoke terror and horror. Its ability to embody and externalize fears and anxieties was
in decline. If they remained, it was more as signs of conflicts and internal states than
as external threats. The new concern of the Gothic emerged as the darkest side of
the romantic ideals of Individuality, Imaginative Consciousness, and Creation. The Gothic became
in part of an internalized world of guilt, restlessness, desperation, a world of transgression
individual who questioned the uncertain limits of imaginative freedom and knowledge
human. The romantic ideals were overshadowed by the passions and extravagance of the Gothic.
External forms were signs of psychological disturbances, of increasingly mental states.
uncertain dominated by fantasy, hallucination, and madness. Terror became secondary in
relationship to horror, the sublime yielded to the supernatural, to an effect of uncertainty, to the irruption of
fantasies, repressed desires, and sexual and emotional conflicts. The supernatural (the mysterious)
began to disturb the safe and familiar sense of reality and normality. The presentation
of altered psychological states, nonetheless, did not indicate a complete subjective disintegration:
the supernatural, which made all boundaries uncertain and in the Gothic writing of the 19th century, sometimes
left the readers with the uncertainty of whether the fictions described psychological alterations or
deeper upheavals in the structures of reality and normality. Gothic fiction
from the 19th explored the gloomy hollows of human subjectivity. The city, a dark forest
or a dark labyrinth itself became a site of nighttime violence and corruption. The
family, in a place turned threatening and mysterious due to the obsessive return of transgressions
past and a persistent guilt in a world increasingly enveloped in the strange. The effort to
to distinguish the apparent from the real, the good from the bad, was internalized instead of being explained
like a supernatural occurrence, a trick of light or imagination. The effects predominated.
mysterious instead of sublime terrors. Doubles, alter egos, mirrors and representations
the animated disturbed parts of human identity became the usual artifices.
Manifesting the alienation of the human subject from the culture and language in which it is situated
located, these devices increasingly destabilized the boundaries between psyche and reality
opening an undetermined area where the differences between fantasy and reality were not certain.
Gothic existed beyond and sometimes within the limits of realistic forms. Forces
psychological rather than supernatural became the executors in a world where
individuals could not be sure of anyone else or of themselves. As the bourgeois modes of
social organization and economic and aesthetic production demanded an increasing realism,
self-discipline and the regulation of its individuals (with techniques developed through practices
social and scientific), those individuals who deviated from their norms became
fascinating objects of scrutiny. The gothic subjects were alienated, divided men of themselves
the same, without control of their passions, desires, and fantasies that had been monitored and partially
expelled in the 18th century. Individuals were products divided between reason and desire. The
the natural, the wild and the untamed were more inner properties than outer ones. The excess emanated
from within, from the hidden, from pathological motivations that rationality cannot control.
Scientific theories and technological innovations nourished 19th-century Gothic writing.
with a new vocabulary and also with new objects of fear and anxiety. The evolutionary model
Darwinian, research in criminology and psychological and anatomical science identified

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the bestial within the human. Categorized forms of deviation and abnormality began to
to explain criminal behavior as a pathological return of animal, instinctive habits.
The ghosts that appeared now were no longer feudal or romantic but rather more of an effect.
from the scientific discourse: guilt and fears obsessed individuals and families
while the primitive models of instinct and motivation threatened the humanity of the species
human. Science, with its chemical preparations, mechanical laboratories, and electrical instruments,
it became a new domain for encountering dark powers, now secular, mental
and animals before supernatural ones. Crime, in a similar way, began to present itself as
a challenge to rationality in a degenerated world that had mysterious motivations.
Defining a divided world of divided beings, science also revealed a sense of
loss, of the decline of human society and its values of strength and individual health.
Faced with this loss (presented as social degeneration and criminal and sexual degradation)
science offered the path to a new spirituality that sought to regain a sense of
value and cultural unity combining science with sacred, religious powers that evoked the
conventional Gothic figures and strategies.
Diffusion
Many of the concerns raised in the Gothic of the 19th century reappear in the 20th century.
This appearance is, however, multifaceted, a diffusion of the traces of the Gothic in a
multiplicity of different genres and media. In science fiction, the adventure novel,
modernist literature, romantic fiction, and popular horror literature resonate with motifs
goths who have been transformed and displaced by different cultural concerns. The terror and
the horror is located in a bureaucratic, technologically alienating reality, in hospitals
psychiatric and criminal subcultures, in future scientific and intergalactic worlds, in fantasy
and in the hidden. The figures of threat, destruction, and violence emerge in the form of scientists
crazy people, psychopaths, aliens, and a bunch of strange and monstrous mutations
supernatural or natural.
A place has perpetuated, however, the Gothic figures: cinema. Since 1930, the
vampires, Jekylls and Hydes, Frankensteins and monsters have been popular on screens
film and TV in a variety of costumes ranging from seriously sinister to comedic and ridiculous. Their
popularity, just like the way in which they ambivalently reflect cultural concerns,
places them in the non-literary cultural tradition that conventionally constitutes the true site
of the Gothic.
On the screen, just as in certain novels, fictions display a more appearance
seriously literary or self-aware. In this regard, they repeat concerns about the
narrativa que están incluidas en la escritura gótica desde sus comienzos: preocupaciones sobre los
limits, effects, and power of representation in the formation of identities, realities, and
institutions. All Gothic mechanisms are signs of superficiality, disappointment and
duplication of narrative and verbal or visual images. In an increasingly skeptical century
regarding the values and practices associated with modernity that perceive those values as
powerful fictions or great tales, the new and still familiar terrors and horrors arise
to present the dissolution of all order, meaning, and identity in a game of signs, images
and texts. One of the main horrors that hides throughout gothic fiction is the
feeling that there is no way out of the dimly lit labyrinth of language.
The spread of Gothic shapes and figures for more than two centuries makes definition difficult.
of a homogeneous generic category. The changing meanings and traits reveal the writing
Gothic as a mode that exceeds genres and categories and is not restricted to a school.
literary to a historical period. Gothic is thus a hybrid form that incorporates and transforms
other literary forms that at the same time develop and transform their own conventions in relation
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with the newest modes of writing. Aside from the period when the Gothic texts were produced
key (which ranges from The Castle of Otranto by Horace Walpole (1764) to Melmoth the Wanderer
by Charles Maturin (1820), it is impossible to define a fixed group of conventions. The Gothic forms
they are not only made up of literatures from the past: the styles that prevail in the respective
the contexts in which the works are produced also provide them with their specific form. Writing
Gothic arises and takes shape in relation to the dominant literary practices (a relationship that is
more antithetical than imitative.
In relation to other forms of writing, Gothic texts have generally been
marginalized, excluded from the realm of acceptable literature. In the kingdom of popular culture,
however, Gothic writing thrived and exerted influence on more properly literary forms.
What could be called the Gothic tradition is no less partial and fragmented than the
literary tradition (which distinguishes itself and its canon of great works according to
different codes and values in specific periods and it results in discontinues and partial). The tradition
Gothic has, however, an extensive, though strange, continuity in the way it outlines
techniques and arguments based on medieval romances and poetry, ballads, and folklore, the
writing of the Renaissance (especially Shakespearean drama and Spenserian poetry), and prose
from the 17th and 18th century. Articulating different forms of writing (popular and sometimes marginal)
in privileged periods and genres such as Romanticism, Realism, and Modernism, writing
Gothic emerges as the thread that defines British literature. In the U.S., where the literary canon
is composed of works in which the influence of Gothic texts is even more visible, the
Literature again seems to be an effect of the Gothic tradition. The Gothic may perhaps be
called the only true literary tradition. Or its stain.

Chapter 6: Homemade Gothic2

In the middle of the 19th century, there is a significant dissemination of Gothic literature both in
through literary fiction as well as popular fiction, especially with the help of sensation
novels of ghost stories. The gothic machinery of the 18th century and the wild landscapes
of romantic individualism give rise to terrors and horrors that are much closer to home and
the breaking down of the boundaries between the interior and the exterior, reality and the
illusion, the right and the corrupt, and materialism and spirituality, a rift that manifests in
the texts through the use of ghosts, doubles, and mirrors. Both in America and in
In England, the influence of Radcliffe, Godwin, and Scott is still evident although their gothic styles.
significantly transformed. The bourgeois family begins to be the setting for the return
of ghosts, and the new anxieties have their origin in the secret and the guilt of transgressions
of the past and of uncertain class origins. Moreover, the modern, industrial, dark, and labyrinthine city,
it transforms into the place where horror, violence, and corruption are situated. In this context,
Scientific discoveries provide new instruments for terror, crime, and the mind.
the criminal presents new and threatening figures of individual and social disintegration. Without
embargo, the traces of Gothic and Romantic forms appear as signs of loss and nostalgia,
as projections of a culture possessed by a sense of deterioration of identity, of
order and of the increasingly disturbing spirit.
The development of the American novel owes a lot to the reception and transformation of the
European romantic literature. However, there are significant differences in the use of the
gothic images: the stereotypical gothic machinery is abandoned, and the contrast of lights and
shadows are reworked in texts in which the mysteries of the mind or of the family past
constitute the central interest. In the American context, the social and human world replaces
completely the great supernatural Gothic terrors, and the presence of a geography and

2
Homely Gothic
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from a history different from the European offers new material for writers. While the
evil aristocrats, the ruined castles and abbeys, and the chivalric codes belonging to
the European gothic tradition is inadequate for the New World, American writers
they discover that romantic adventures can take place in the wilds of an unknown continent
and that horror can be found in the 17th century Salem witch trials.
In the preface to The Marble Faun (1860)3 , Nathaniel Hawthorne points out the difficulty that
presents the production of romances in American territory due to the absence of shadows and
mysteries that surround and characterize European culture. However, in his early novels he has
place the presence of peculiarly American shadows that contrast with the 'wide and simple
"light" of life in the new continent since, although the darkness of European Gothic is
inadequate in the new context, American culture is filled with small mysteries and
culpable secrets related to the family and communal past. In 1865 Henry James, in one of his
essays dedicated to sensational fiction, critiques the extravagant resources used by
Anne Radcliffe to shock the reader when, from her point of view, it is much more
interesting and terrible to appeal to the strangeness that surrounds one's own home. For James, a good
ghost stories must be largely connected with everyday objects.

American Gothic: Brown, Hawthorne, and Poe

Charles Brockden Brown, the first professional writer born in America, holds a
important position regarding the transformations taking place in Gothic writing. The
Brown's novels draw on fiction and the philosophy of William Godwin, but they take place in them
a reworking of the themes of persecution, criminality, and social tyranny as well as
the Enlightenment notions of freedom and democracy. The mystery undergoes a similar transformation and the
illusions and psychological motivations are beginning to be examined in relation to their implications
social and aesthetic. Between 1798 and 1800, Brown publishes four novels that are concerned with
persecution, murder, and the powers and terrors of the human mind. The first of them, Wieland,
describe the life of two orphans, Clara and Theodore Wieland, who grow up in a context of
religious evangelism and Enlightenment rationality. A balance between these two discourses seems to be
sustained until the sound of strange voices intrudes into the community and Wieland interprets these
voices as emanations of God. However, it is their devoted faith that leads to the horrors that
They destroy the community: believing it is the will of God, Wieland kills his wife and his children.
and finally commits suicide.
The strange events are explained in the memoirs of a human ex machina devil.
that appear at the end of the novel. These memoirs tell the story of Carwin, a ventriloquist.
able to imitate the voices of others. His talent makes him an outcast and, after years of
roaming and being pursued, it settles near the Wieland community to harass its members
through his biological skills. What is never explained or confessed is whether Carwin is
involved in the crime of Wieland, whether he instigated its execution, or if said crime was really the
result of a deceptive religious imagination. The intertwining of different narratives that connect to
this novel with gothic romance highlights at the same time a different perspective regarding the
nature of the mysterious since mysteries are located in the empirical world, in the
natural powers of Carwin and in the chain of events that lead to the crime. The entanglement of the
two accounts and the way certain issues remain uncertain reveal a great deal of
mystery in the complexity of motivations and fantasies that determine and deceive the
individual behavior. The rational explanation of natural powers and their mechanical image of
a universe beyond human control changes the realms of mystery: from a gothic world of
supernatural manifestations move towards the postulation of a physical and empirical world. But the

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The Marble Faun.
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the strength of the illusion inspired by religious devotion remains somehow mysterious and
inexplicable and presents not the victory of the Enlightenment but a new and different darkness.
The uncertain relationship between religion and rationalism is located in Wielanden at the level
of political and aesthetic representation. The ambivalence between a rational explanation and a
the supernatural is not resolved. In the American context, this ambivalence reflects a concern.
regarding American society itself. Partly as a demystification of traditions
European Gothic that presented aristocratic and superstitious terrors, and in part as
relocalization of the mystery from the supernatural to a human and natural sphere, Wielandrechaza the
dichotomy between religious mysticism and Enlightenment rationality casting a suspicion regarding the
authority and the effects of its representations while identifying the shadows that emerge as
result of the lights, whether of reason or of revelation. On the other hand, it is a darkness
related to an individual pathology and the effect of repressions and desires produced by
the authoritarian representations.
Nathaniel Hawthorne's commitment to romance, in contrast with that upheld
by Brockden Brown, it starts from realism. Less concerned than Brown about the
crime and individual pathology, Hawthorne demystifies the gothic representations of a
a haunting past and the superstitions associated with it that extend into the present to
focus on the game of light and shadows present in the family and society. In The Scarlet Letter
(1850)4the specter of Puritan intolerance hovers over the community that condemns a young woman
woman, Hester, to wear a letter on her chest as a symbol of her adultery. Demonized,
Hester and her little daughter live in exile at the edge of the community. The girl's father carries
a life marked by guilt and anxiety within the community itself under a
a veneer of respectability that becomes increasingly thin, as thin as the line that
separate good from evil. The limits and conventions that distinguish what is good from what is bad are
they turn, based on the exclusions that legitimize and the repression they demand, into an element
of an even greater darkness than Hester's immorality.
While in The Scarlet Letter (1850) the focus is on the limits of adequacy.
Social, other stories by Hawthorne address the past with a more psychological interest. In 'Young'
Goodman Brown" (1835) tells the story of a young man's nocturnal journey through the forest that leads him
at a meeting with respectable parishioners and elders that, as suggested by the mysterious character
that accompanies him are not the example of dazzling virtue that they seem to be. Upon arriving at a
ceremony of witches and wizards that takes place in the center of the forest, Goodman Brown discovers a
social spectrum of supposedly respectable figures alongside others with a bad reputation. The narrative
concludes with an uncertain note, which does not allow the reader to decide whether the narrated events were
real, whether they were just a dream, or whether they were the hallucinated visions of a superstitious young man. The
the only element that is proposed as certain within the text is the effect that lived experience
produced in the protagonist. The young Goodman Brown returns as a different man to a
community that apparently has not changed and begins to deeply suspect the
external appearances and all forms of faith, suspicious and dark until the day of his death.
This game of appearances and of interaction between past and present and between superstition and
reality remains in Hawthorne's second novel The House of the Seven Gables (1851)5 . Al
just like conventional gothic texts, the heart of Hawthorne's novel is a building,
although in this case it is no longer about an ancient castle but rather a family house, which nonetheless,
as occurs in the case of Gothic castles, it constitutes a dark and grotesque repository of
ghosts. Looking back at the times of colonization, the story focuses on the theft

4
The Scarlet Letter, a novel by Hawthorne.
5
The House of the Seven Gables, Hawthorne's second novel
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from the land upon which the house of the seven roofs is built and in the curse that Maule,
the victim throws over Pynchon, the new owner, who suddenly dies after the
inauguration of the abode establishing the foundations for local superstition. Two generations
later, the family is in decline and its inhabitants roam like ghosts in the
interior of the house and its memories of transgression. The arrival of a stranger and the death of
older member of the family in the same way his grandfather died leads to a conclusion
gothic. The stranger, who turns out to be the heir of the old Maule, claims the property through the
marriage to the youngest member of the Pynchon family. Due to their knowledge of the
secrets of the past surrounding the house, manages to find the deeds that had been hidden
in the house for years and that allow him to regain the property. Thus, the ghosts are
exorcised and replaced by the values that constitute property and domesticity.
Además, se introduce una explicación para los misterios y se determina que las muertes son el
result of the stroke and not of the curse of Maule. However, the field of superstition
it does not disappear but remains in the reaction towards more innovative resources: the old ones
gothic portraits are replaced by the daguerreotype photographer and mesmerism replaces the
demonic possession. While the present exorcises the superstitions of the past and domesticates
The Gothic terrors, the daguerreotype has sinister effects by bringing the dead to life.
The sinister effects of representation are also present in the stories of
Hawthorne that deals with the theme of artistic creation. In 'The Artist of the Beautiful'6 (1844), a
watchmaker works for years to create a perfect replica of a butterfly only for his
mechanical marvel ended up shattered by the clumsy swipe of a child. In Hawthorne the
beauty production is not an idealized business due to the obsessive work it entails which
undermines the artist's connection to reality. The attraction of beauty is the central theme of
another tale by Hawthorne, "Rappacini's Daughter"7 (1844), in which both the professor's daughter
Rappacini, like her wonderful garden of exotic plants, is extremely attractive and
deadly poisonous. The world of artifice and representation is characterized by the
possession of mysterious powers that stimulate fantasy and hallucination.
The distortions produced by the imagination are notably worked on in the
horrific and macabre stories of Edgar Allan Poe. In Poe's tales, the external traps of
eighteenth-century Gothic, darkness, decadence, and extravagance are turned inward
of the subject to present psychodramas of sick imaginations and deceptive visions that lead
the grotesque fantasies to spectral extremes. The horror in Poe's stories displays a
morbid fascination with dark and exotic scenarios that reflect extreme states and excess
imaginative of a disturbed consciousness. Human wishes and neuroses are colored in the
phantasmal shades of the supernatural to the point that nightmare and reality appear
intermixed.
The extensive readings that Poe conducted of the works of English Gothic writers and
Germans forged their ambivalent attitude towards the gender. Aware of the possibilities
humorous formulaic Gothic tales popularized by newspapers like Blackwood
Magazines of the inherent ironies of Romanticism (delineated by August Schlegel, one of its
favorite authors) Poe's stories maintain a distance, an ambivalence, regarding the
terrors and imaginaries that they present.
Poe's fiction, which simultaneously promotes and questions the dark powers of the
imagination, leaves unresolved the boundaries between reality, illusion, and madness instead of taming them
gothic motives or rationalizing mysteries in the manner of their contemporaries. Their themes are

6
“El artista de la belleza”, cuento de Hawthorne.
7
"The Daughter of Rappaccini," a tale by Hawthorne.
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varied and are based on the exploration of individual cases of deceptive illusions and concerns
general issues related to death. Doubles and mirrors are used in their fiction to
to produce splendid effects while scientific theories are used as sources for
introduce horror into texts where the investigation leads to the criminal and not to mysteries
supernatural.
In 'William Wilson' (1839), Poe recalls his school days in England in a narrative
that maintains the atmosphere of the early Gothic works. The text, which presents the history of a
a boy who meets another young man who has the same name -William Wilson- who.
infuriates through mocking imitation, works with the theme of the double that was already present
present in the previous Gothic literature. Throughout the story, the protagonist lives a corrupt life and
dissolute but her wicked plans are continually thwarted by the appearance of the figure that
he has been harassed since his school years. Finally, the young man duels with his double, and when he succeeds in
wounded, he realizes that he is alone and bleeding in front of a large mirror: his mortal enemy
it has been its inverted image, an alter ego that, unlike the doppelgänger, turns out to be a version
improved, an external image of the consciousness of good. In this way, the story, which initially
is presented as the narrative of an external harassment, is framed at the end as the distortion
subjective that is produced by individual hallucination.
In 'The Fall of the House of Usher' (1834)8the boundaries between consciousness and reality are still
more uncertain. The house where the action takes place is a gothic manifestation, a construction in
ruins located in the midst of a dark and desolate landscape, and their decay also characterizes the
family that inhabits it whose last members are on the brink of death due to a
unknown and incurable disease. A friend arrives to witness the disappearance of the family and
You witness how the siblings Roderick and Madeline gradually transform into shadows. Their
lingering decay leads to a striking Gothic conclusion in which, before dying, Roderick
announces that his sister has been buried alive as her body rises shrouded.
from inside a secret panel to fall on his brother and die together in the same
In an instant. The narrator flees as a storm begins to surround the house and at the end of the story.
this collapses completely.
The morbid and macabre images of premature burial and the return of the dead have
a realistic twist in 'The Cask of Amontillado' (1846) in which premature burial is the
horrific climax of the story of personal revenge. The story presents the narration in the first person.
the way a wronged man takes advantage of his enemy's weakness - the
pride that his knowledge of wines gave him - and it leads him through a series of
underground vaults under the pretext of testing a harvest to then chain him, wall him up and
abandon him to his fate. More horrific than the events presented is the tone of
self-satisfaction of the narrator. The choice of the vaults as a setting for the action.
helps to generate a gothic atmosphere within a text that is essentially a story of
horror about an insensibly inhuman intelligence. In other stories, as in the case of
"Ligeia" (1838), the grotesque settings and descriptions of the ghostly return of the beloved wife
death is the external reflections of an imagination deteriorated by loss and addiction to
opio. In 'The Tell-Tale Heart' 9 (1843) the crime is treated with a similar ambivalence regarding
to the objectivity or subjectivity of the narrated phenomenon: a man is led to confess his crime
due to the presence of a persistent sound that he interprets as the beating of his heart
victim whose body lies hidden beneath the floor of the room. In "The Facts in the Case of Mr
"Valdemar" (1845) contemporary scientific themes constitute the basis of an exploration

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The Fall of the House of Usher
9
The Tell-Tale Heart
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metaphysics of horror that arises from the alteration of the boundaries between life and death. In the narrative,
a dying man undergoes a mesmerization process that leads him to a state
suspended between life and death: the body does not disintegrate but begins to speak and emits the
impossible words 'I am dead.' This statement produces confusion regarding the distinction between the
life and death and indicates the fragility of the natural boundaries that are manipulated by the
scientific imagination. The horror surrounding the question of who or what is speaking reaches its
culminating point when the mesmerism process is interrupted and the body decomposes
quickly becoming a liquid mass.
Throughout the stories, the ghostly settings and extravagant scenes often
introduce questions about the nature and effects of representation. 'The Oval'
Portrait10(1845), a short story that consciously uses conventional resources of
gothic like the old castle, the manuscript found and the portrait that seems alive, discusses the capacity
of the representations to invert the relationship between life and death: the portrait that seems alive
it is a perfect representation of the artist's beautiful beloved and was completed precisely in the
moment when she died. In this way, art seems to extract the life from things and reproduces the
nature with a disturbing imaginative power, the macabre power of death that repeats itself in the
length of all Poe's tales. It is not just the morbid fascination and the macabre auras that
that make them interesting as Gothic works. The various resources, styles, and themes that Poe uses
And transformations exerted a strong influence on all the Gothic writers who emerged.
subsequently: the doubles, the mirrors, and the concern for modes of representation; the
scientific transgressions of accepted boundaries; the interplay between internal and external narratives,
between uncertain psychological states and strange events; the location of the mystery in a
criminal world that is penetrated by the incisive reason of a new hero, the detective, has
converted into characteristic elements of Gothic literature.

Chapter 8: Gothic in the 20th Century

In the twentieth century, cinema has upheld Gothic fiction with countless film versions of the
classic gothic novels. Thus, the gothic, always linked to popular culture, is once again at home.
In addition, the dissemination and proliferation of genres that had begun in the 19th century is accelerating.
In the twentieth century, Gothic fluctuates, especially in German and American works, between the
representations of cultural, familial, and individual fragmentation, the unsettling breaks of the
limits between the inner self, social values, and concrete reality and modern forms of
barbarism and monstrosity. Science fiction, linked to the gothic since Frankenstein, presents new
objects of terror and horror in strangely mutated life forms and alien invaders
other worlds or of future worlds. However, there is a significant divergence between science
fiction and the strategies of Gothic: the cultural concerns of the present are not projected to
not from the past but are located in the future.
The predominance of inventions and scientific experiments as motives for horror stories
And horror is part of a change in objects and effects of fear. Unlike the incarnations
previous Gothic, scientific themes are not in opposition to religious modes or
spiritual ways of understanding and organizing the world. Sacred ideas of individuality appear.
human communities as horrified reaction to science. Located in a secular world, the
science means the oppressive domination of technological production, bureaucratic organization and
social regulation. What is lost and recovered in the confrontation with inspiring machines
scientific, with mutants and inhumans and with automated worlds is a virtually
religious of integrity and human action.

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The Oval Portrait
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The loss of human identity, the alienation of the Self, and the social behaviors through which
a sense of reality is strengthened, they are presented in the threatening forms of environments each
more dehumanized, mechanical doubles and a violent, psychotic fragmentation. These
Alterations are linked to a growing disengagement with dominant structures and forms.
of modernity, forms that have been characterized as narratives, as powerful myths and
penetrating forces that shape the identities, institutions, and modes of production that govern life
everyday. In this 'postmodern condition', the break of the grand narratives of modernity
reveals the horror that identity, reality, truth, and meaning are not only effects of
these narratives are subject to dispersion and the multiplication of meanings, realities
and identities that erase the possibility of imagining any human order or unity. Progress,
rationality and civilization, increasingly suspect, yield to new forms of
sublimation and excess, in the face of new terrors, irrationalities and dehumanizations.

Modern Gothic Script

A large part of the writing related to Gothic in the early 20th century derives from the
styles of the late 19th century. Anxiety objects take their familiar shapes from the
earliest manifestations: cities, houses, archaic and hidden pasts, primitive energies,
disturbed individuals and scientific experiments are the places from where they are unleashed
imposing and inhuman terrors that prey on a trusting world, that do nothing
suspicion.
The sensation of a threatening, grotesque, and irrational presence that penetrates into life
everyday and generates its decomposition emerges in the gothic fiction produced, predominantly,
in the southern states of the U.S. Centered on houses in the style of the tradition established by Poe in
The fall of the House of Usher, the disintegration of the normal and the familiar in Southern Gothic points to
the decline of the family and culture. The disjointed perspectives of William's fiction
Faulkner presents an absurd, grotesque, and decadent world through the disturbed consciousness of
misfits and dissenters sometimes on the brink of madness. In the texts of women of this
period, the forms of decay, fear, and fragmentation reflect significant sexual differences.
"The Yellow Wallpaper" (1892) by Charlotte Perkins Gilman updates the gothic themes of the
female oppression and confinement. "Clytie" (1941), by Eudora Welty, describes the oppressive atmosphere
perceived by a woman in an absolutely disintegrated family. The internal focus of the Gothic of
it manifests itself in the predominance of subjective states that grotesquely distort the limits
between fantasy and reality. A recent and very significant review and extension of the Gothic tradition
America takes place in Beloved (1987), by Toni Morrison. The occupied house and the ghostly
recuerdos de transgresión que la habitan, proveen la escena para un relato que oscila entre el pasado
and the present to discover, in the interweaving of a repressed individual story with a history
suppressed culture, the internal and external effects of racial oppression.

Science fiction and cinema

In science fiction, horror always finds numerous and varied sources and objects.
Its origins are linked to texts like Frankenstein, one of the romantic works that
impressed H.G. Wells, the most influential writer in the reformulation of science fiction
He/She carried out the strategies of Gothic. The concerns that run through the late Victorian culture
the 19th century appears in works like The Island of Dr. Moreau (1896) - with its mad scientist
carrying out a strange variation of Darwin's theory to populate an island with its bizarre and
monstrous experimental creatures - and in the threat of an alien invasion in The War of
The Worlds (1898). Humanity is called into question by the nightmarish vision of worlds.
futures and strangers. Threatened by extraterrestrial machines, humanity is also threatened
for conceptions in which it is perceived as a biological mechanism among others
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mechanisms that compete. In the identification of terror and horror as forces that invade the
present from the future before from the past, Wells inaugurates an important diversion that
returns some of the mysterious devices of obsolete Gothic fiction: while the
the eruption of horror from the past served as a way to evoke emotions that would reconstitute.
human values, the future only presents a dark and unknown space from which
the horrors are visited.
In the texts and films associated with cyberculture, the artificial forms that are endowed
of life and consciousness project the current concerns regarding the disintegration of the
social and cultural formations of the West in a nightmarish vision of the future. The novel
Neuromancer (1984), by William Gibson, is set in a future inhabited by large
corporations and controlled by computers. The homogenized society and the artificial order that
the text is related to the diasporic proliferation of subcultures centered on
drugs, violence, and terror. Humans are little more than accessories for machines, left to
side as economically unproductive debris or reconstructed according to needs and
technological capabilities, leaving natural and human supplements on the brink of extinction.
However, the 'romance' indicated in the title is far from being insignificant. The novel
it contains a clearly romantic plot, underscored by references to fictional precursors
like vampires. The hero, a cyberspace cowboy named Case, is forced to participate in
an attack, to penetrate the defenses of the castle-home of a certain family controlling both
The most powerful Artificial Intelligences in the world, Neuromancer and Wintermute. This place, Villa
Straylight is presented as a 'gothic madness.' In the labyrinth of this construction and, for
Case, in the labyrinth of cyberspace, the climax takes place: the two computers
they manage to synthesize, creating an absolutely new form of life.
The fusion of old and new forms of 'romance' is repeated throughout science fiction. In the
modernization of old terrors and in the horrific encounters with life that virtually
reproduce human existence, nature, and the essence associated with the human figure
they become uncertain, if not obsolete.
Set in a dark, ruined, and alienated future Los Angeles, the film Blade Runner
In Ridley Scott's film, the fate of a group of renegade 'replicants', artificial creations, is followed.
virtually indistinguishable from humans, while they try, like the monster of
Frankenstein, to make his creator (the scientist who controls the Tyrell corporation) agree to his
orders for a more human lifespan. The discontented blade runner Deckard, whose task is
identifying and eliminating the replicas is the parallel subject of the film that divides sympathies between the
the pursuer and the pursued. Trapped between the blade runner and the replica, between the human and the
android, the narration gradually erodes the differences that distinguish one from the other, leaving
questions surrounding the romantic final simulation of the first version of the film. The films that
they establish the romantic difference between the strong, self-sufficient, and autonomous individuality and the
destructive, mechanical and programmed simulations are numerous (e.g., Terminator).
In Alien (1979), the ruined spaceship and the desolate planet suggest darkness, ruin.
and the desolation of Gothic fiction. On the other hand, the horror of the alien does not reside solely in its
lethal power: its parasitic mode of reproduction means it is a threat that emerges from
inside. In the cavernous and labyrinthine cargo hold, the atmosphere of terror and suspense sustained by
the reversible dynamic of hunters and hunted follows gothic patterns. This is reinforced by the
the film's focus from a woman, Ripley, who becomes a science fiction heroine
Gothic. In any case, the strength and self-sufficiency of the heroine distinguishes her from more...
ancient, whose fainting and weakness indicated the absence of the power of the pursued femininity.
Sexual differences, on the other hand, are present in the maternal images suggested by the
design of the alien 'mother' ship. The ship is a giant uterus, the repository of eggs that
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they will become a monstrous and destructive progeny. The associations with the conflicted
The emotions evoked by the mother in the 'female gothic' are nonetheless complicated by the
irony of the name of the computer, "Mother": this suggests that the matrix of technology and of
artificial intelligence has replaced human figures.
Metropolis11(1926) combines visually and narratively the old with the new in a
surprising example of modernist Gothic. The angelic heroine, the tyrannical father, and the sequences
of persecutions along underground tunnels and caves are combined with a scientist
crazy that creates a heroine-robot. The sinister city is divided between a class of slaves
humanos, industrialmente robotizados, forzados a vivir una existencia subterránea manteniendo a
the imposing machines that make the city run, and the rich who enjoy pleasures
lusciously decadent surface world. The monstrous and inhuman oppression of a
the class on the other hand is harshly presented both in the dominant machines and in the
manufacture of an automatic anti-heroine (sign of artificiality and deception of the
ideological manipulation). Produced during a period in which political and economic systems
Europe was suffering severe crises, the dark vision of capitalist modes of production.
and social reproduction is as impressive as the romantic ending of the film in which love wins
above the social class.
Frankenstein, Dracula, and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde constitute a trio of texts that has
shaped the Gothic foundation of horror and terror cinema in the 20th century. In the numerous versions
Certain themes have persisted: dual personality, threat, and excitement.
of scientific experimentation, and the violence and insanity that threaten from within and from
Outside. In the 1950s, North America, dominated by the Cold War, linked fear of invasion
their communities and human bodies. The Hammer studies were produced in the United Kingdom, in the
'60s and '70s, a series of formulaic horror films shaped by concerns regarding the
social and sexual liberations of the period.
In its excess of all limits, in its uncertain effects on the audience, is where the
gothic horrors are more disturbing. That these effects are ambivalent has been evidenced,
since the 18th century onwards, due to the ability of Gothic formulas to produce laughter from a
as abundant as emotions of horror and terror. The standardized formulas and themes are
eminently susceptible to parody and self-parody. In the 20th century, this has been constant
exploited since Abbott and Costello mocked the gothic classics. Cartoons, comics and
television comedies have repeatedly resorted to various combinations and amalgams of figures
of texts that seem to merge into one.

Postmodern Gothic
The game of fear and laughter has been part of Gothic since its beginnings. Uncertainty
it perpetuates Gothic concerns in the generic-narrative plane and affects all categories and limits
from the generic to the social. Producing powerful emotions before aesthetic judgments, effects
about audiences and readers before teachings, the narrative forms and resources are focused
from the world of fantasy and fiction to the realm of the real and the social.
One of the growing concerns of the 20th century regarding the consideration of the
modernity as a combination of civilization, progress, and rationality, focuses on the way in
that social, historical, and individual formations are linked with the effects
organizers of certain stories. Perceived as a condensation of great stories, the
the legitimacy, universality, and unity of modernity is called into question. Part of the challenges to
the assumptions, meanings, exclusions, and suppressions of modernity have emerged in fictions

11
Film by the German Fritz Lang.
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that juxtapose, and consequently reorganize, styles and narrative relationships. The fiction of
Angela Carter, for example, consciously mixing different forms (which include
the fairy tale, the legend, the science fiction and the Gothic) shows the interaction of stories
shaping reality and identity, particularly in relation to production of
meanings for sexuality.
Throughout Gothic fiction, horror and terror have depended on things not being what they seem.
that they seem. In the complex assemblage of the different stories of early gothic novels the
labyrinthine complexity finally reveals its secret and produces the horror that expels the object of
fear restoring conventional boundaries. A mysterious and disturbing uncertainty
this process is darkened by an ambivalence and duplicity that cannot be contained. In the
Gothic fictions and films are this ambivalence and duplicity that have emerged as a form.
clearly reflective of narrative anxiety. This includes a penetrating cultural concern -
characterized as postmodernist - by the fact that things are not only not what
they seem but that what they seem is what they are: not a unity of word (or image) and thing, but
words (and images) without things or as things in themselves, effects of narrative forms and nothing
more. Unstable and not based on any reality, truth, or identity beyond those that the
tales tales provide, there arises a threat of sublime excess, of a new darkness of multiple and
labyrinthine tales, in which human myths dissolve again, confronted by a
mysterious force beyond their control.
The horror of textuality is linked to the perverse terrors of disintegration.
anarchic or psychotic dissolution. In an impressive example of Gothic fiction, The name of the
Rosa (1980), Umberto Eco deploys this textual form. With self-consciously gothic traits.
like the story that details the discovery of a medieval manuscript, the gloomy surroundings,
the dark vaults, the mysterious deaths, and the medieval history and architecture that run through it,
the novel rearticulates the distinctions between Enlightenment rationality and religious superstition. The arrival
of a monk, William of Baskerville, and his novice, the narrator Adso, to a 14th-century monastery
dominated by a large octagonal library coincides with a series of mysterious and macabre
deaths. Interpreted as signs of divine apocalypse or of diabolical machinations, the
deaths predict greater terrors for the superstitious monastic community. Baskerville, like
his name suggests, he has deduction powers like those of Sherlock Holmes and goes out to provide a
rational explanation for the supposedly supernatural terrors. But Baskerville, a monk and
detective, is also slightly different from its conventional fictional predecessors. Its
rational and detective skills are presented as critical and analytical skills: he is
an excellent reader of signs and narrative conventions (and superstition appears as an effect
from the bad reading). Following the clues through the dark corridors and vaults of
monastery, Baskerville uncovers the fragmented and textual trail of signs and secret codes that
they conceal and cause crimes, leading to horror and explanation in the secret chamber of the
labyrinthine library. The horror is not a bloody specter or corpse but takes the form of the
Baskerville's double, an elderly librarian named Jorge, possessed by religious dogmatism and
a callous and diabolical cunning. For the order that Jorge represents, laughter is dangerous as long as
enemy of truth and power. Her fear of laughter, however, produces her own acts of
irrational and intolerant omission. The violence of the dogmatic and restricted order of Jorge
sanctions is, from the identification of the narrator with the position of Baskerville, evidenced for
to become the true object of horror, associated with the superstitious and tyrannical oppression that
Throughout Gothic fiction, it is linked to the injustice and cruelty of the Catholic Inquisition.
arbitrary, irrational and restrictive power is fought by the enlightened and rational humanism of
Baskerville. The invocation of Enlightenment values that are produced and contested throughout
Gothic fiction is made with a significant difference: truth and reason are no longer seen
as absolute or as agents of systems of power. Instead, they are seen as ways of
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to read in which the texts remain open and plural, without their execution being subject to a
significance singular, restricted and partial (politically interested). The final reflections of
Adso remains uncertain about the motivations and ideas of his mentor and regarding the message.
that his own manuscript possesses. The uncertainty, presented throughout the novel in terms
textual, is repeated in a final anecdote of a later return of Adso to the monastery which
the library was destroyed in the great fire that occurred as a result of the confrontation between
Jorge and Baskerville. In the midst of the ruins of the library, Adso collects and catalogs some of the
little fragments of books that remain: "at the end of my reconstruction, I had before me
a kind of smaller library, a symbol of the larger one, of the vanished: a library
made of fragments, quotes, truncated phrases, amputated stumps of books." While
name of the rose advances this vision of the fragmentary forms of textual bodies,
individual and social, whose meanings and identities are effects of patients and partial
reconstructions, the image of disintegration that this implies shakes those positions that have
are sustained by narratives of unity, homogeneity, and totality (individual, social, and natural).

FRED BOTTINGGOTHIC. .............................................................................................................................. 1

IINTRODUCTION: EXCESS AND TRANSGRESSION GOTHICS ........................................................................................ 1
Excess
Transgression
Diffusion
CCHAPTER6: GHomemade Optics.......................................................................................................................... 6
ETHE AMERICAN GOTHICBROWN, HAWTHORNE YPOE..................................................................................... 7
CCHAPTER8: ELGOPTICAL IN THE CENTURYXX ...................................................................................................... 11
EMODERN GOTHIC SCRIPT....................................................................................................................... 12
CSCIENCE FICTION AND CINEMA................................................................................................................................. 12
GPOSTMODERN OPTICS.................................................................................................................................... 14

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