#Austenblogging

[saint-starflicker]

Overview and Criteria for Gothic Fiction

Gothic as a genre of fiction novel emerged in the late 18th century and early 19th century. Modern scholars frame these works as part of a Romanticist pushback against the Enlightenment era of calculated, scientific rationalism. In English literature, these may also have been artistic expressions of the collective anxieties of British people regarding the French Revolution. The term hearkens back to the destruction of the Roman Empire in the 5th century CE at the effect of Gothic peoples, an event that marks the beginning of the medieval era. As early as the year 1530 CE, Giorgio Vasari criticized medieval architecture as gothic, that is "monstrous", "barbarous", and "disordered" contrasted against the elegant and progressive neoclassical architecture reconstructions. In the late 20th century, a subculture of post-punk horror rockers began to be described as Gothic as well. This subcultural goth variation characterized itself by an aesthetic of counter-cultural macabre and "enjoyable fear".

Notable early works of what would become the gothic literary "canon" are listed as follows: The Castle of Otranto by Horace Walpole (1764), The Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne by Ann Radcliffe (1789), The Castle of Wolfenbach by Eliza Parsons (1793), and The Mysteries of Udolpho by Ann Radcliffe (1794). Udolpho is the name of a castle. Early gothic literature was intertwined with an admiration for gothic architecture, sorry to Vasari Giorgio who hated that sort of thing so much but is an outlier and should not be counted.

One example of French gothic literature in this vein is Notre-Dame de Paris by Victor Hugo, published in 1831 although the story is set in 1482 and it was about a gothic cathedral rather than a gothic castle. Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen is an affectionate parody of the gothic literature genre and a staunch defense of the gothic novels' artistic merits. It was completed in 1803 but not published until 1818 after the author's death.

In Northanger Abbey, a character recommends to her friend a list of books in this genre, all the titles of which were publications contemporary to the time the author was writing about them: The Italian by Ann Radcliffe, Clermont by Regina Maria Roche, The Mysterious Warning by Eliza Parsons, Necromancer of the Black Forest by Lawrence Flammenberg, The Midnight Bell by Francis Lathorn, Orphan of the Rhine by Eleanor Sleath, and Horrid Mysteries by Carl Grosse.

The appeal of these stories was less the architecture itself and more the emotions evoked by being haunted by the past, threatened by unknown histories, frightened by misunderstood monsters, and in awe of wilderness and nature. All of this would be set at or relative to a location: a gothic building. Heroines in gothic stories would commonly be abducted from convents that they sought refuge in, or confined to convents or other locations against their will when they try to exercise their freedoms. Other common tropes became the journey of a gothic heroine in an unfamiliar country, and the horrors of being made to rely on guardians who make impositions against her wishes or best interests. In other cases, the gothic horror mixed with gothic infatuation would be shown by an invasion of sorts by a foreigner in the heroine's home country, person of color, or the occupation of a disabled person. These works frequently lend themselves to queer readings.

The common and notable qualities of what works came to be considered gothic literature between the 1819 publication of The Vampyre by John William Polidori and the 1896 publication of The Werewolf by Clemence Housman, naturally expanded and evolved with the inclusion of more works within this genre. Even now in the 21st century the continued recognizability of the gothic applies to new additions to the genre. The criteria for what qualifies a gothic story follows:

Ill-Reputed Work. The story is accused of being degrading to high culture, bad for society, immoral, populist or counter-cultural. At the very least, it's considered bad art and ugly.

Haunted by the Past. This can be found in a work framed accordingly in the cultural context that inspired the authors, such as early 19th century English literature of this genre as a response to the French Revolution. Works emblematic of the Southern Gothic in the United States could be framed in the context of the anxieties surrounding the Civil War. More often, however, it is personal history that haunts a gothic character.

Architecture. This is not necessarily mere mention of a building, or even a lush description of literally gothic architecture. This is more a sense of location. While it stands to reason that confined locations are buildings, the narrative function of architecture can be served by themes of isolation and confinement. Social consensus that is impossible to navigate or escape is a gothic sentiment. This is, of course, more clearly qualified if the architecture is literally a building.

Wilderness. This is not necessarily natural environments, but rather situations that are unpredictable and overwhelming. Storms can be similarly admired, those "dark and stormy night"s. The anxiety invoked by nautical horror emerges from the contrast between a human being made to feel small and out of control when situated on the open ocean and all its depths and mysteries. The gothic simplicity of fairy tales relies on the inhospitable and chaotic woods full of bandits, wolves, and maybe even witches. Logically, a city should be more architecture than wilderness, but if the narrative purpose is chaotic unpredictable vastness horror rather than confinement horror then the city can become a gothic wilderness. This is, of course, more clearly qualified if the wilderness is literally the weather.

Big Mood Energy. This is what I call a collection of emotions evoked by the design of gothic literature. The sense of vulnerability in the face of grandeur, or overwhelming emotion, is known as Sublime. The betrayal of that which is supposed to be familiar is known as the Uncanny. A disruption or disrespect of identity, order, or security is known as the Abject. Gothic literature often evokes disgust and discomfort with ambiguity, or showcases melodramatic sentimentality, or includes heavyhanded symbolism. Gothic literature explores boundaries and deconstructs the rules that keep readers comfortable.

Optionally, Supernatural. As a response to Enlightenment-era science and rationalism, the supernatural found new importance in gothic literature, symbolically and in the evocative emotions it wrought.

The growing edge of genre gothic I think can be found in genre overlap with picaresque stories, detective mysteries, works of libertine sensationalism, science fiction, fairy tales, and dark academia. Quaint tropes are subverted or transformed, and new ones can emerge in the symbolic conversation that works of fiction can strike up with one another. I hope the above criteria remains a useful guide.

Sources:

Peake, Jak. “Representing the Gothic.” 30 April 2013, University of Essex. Lecture. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B51o-1KTJhw

Nixon, Lauren. “Exploring the Gothic in Contemporary Culture and Criticism.” 4 August 2017, University of Sheffield. Lecture. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JZP4g0eZmo8

"Why Are Goths? History of the Gothic 18th Century to Now". Wright, Carrie. 17 December 2022. www.youtube.com/watch?v=TrIK6pBj4f8

"8 Aspects of Gothic Books". Teed, Tristan. 19 June 2021. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NULLOYGiSDI

Burke, Edmund. A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. London, Vernor & Hood, etc., 1798. Originally published in 1756.

Freud, Sigmund. The Uncanny, Penguin Books, New York, 2003. Originally published in 1919.

Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, translated by Leon Roudiez, Columbia University Press, New York, NY, 2010. Originally published in 1984.

Commentary and reading list under Read More.

Commentary

I owe to Tristan Teed the idea of framing emergent gothic literature as countercultural to Enlightenment rationalism and science, and this pushback symbolized by wilderness; Dr. Jak Peake for contextualizing gothic literature as an artistic response to civic unrest in general, and highlighting the fear of seductive immigrants in Bram Stroker's Dracula more specifically; Carrie Wright for the feminist readings of the literary references in Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey, and Dr. Lauren Nixon framing the term gothic as originally meaning bad art—the lattermost aspect I personally consider integral to the genre as it must remain a constant interrogation of what artistic expression we as a society consider "bad art" and why. Both Wright and Teed inspired the aspects list applied to an otherwise categorization-defiant genre that gothic literature is. Critical Race Theory readings and Queer Theory readings of works considered part of gothic literature canon, I would say are informed by the works themselves being very suggestive of these readings. Sheridan Le Fanu's 1872 Carmilla influenced Rachel Klein's 2002 The Moth Diaries that blurred the lines between the homosocial and the homoerotic at a girl's boarding school. Florian Tacorian (not listed in these citations, but go watch his videos) highlighted Romani presence in adaptations of Victor Hugo's Notre-Dame de Paris, as well as Emily Brontë's 1847 novel Wuthering Heights. The work of another Brontë sister, Charlotte Brontë, is more often mentioned as though closer to the core canon gothic literature, and the eponymous Jane Eyre contends with a Creole woman confined to the attic of her new home (this was written in 1847, the race issue was made explicit in Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys published in 1966 that was a retelling of Jane Eyre.)

Notes on the works of gothic literature mentioned: As of this writing, I have read Northanger Abbey, The Vampyre, Carmilla, Dracula, and only half of Notre-Dame de Paris. I have only watched a movie adaptation of The Moth Diaries. (Update as of the 8th of October 2023: I finished reading The Moth Diaries by Rachel Klein. This whole essay was posted on the 1st of October 2023.) (Update as of December 2023: I finished reading Jane Eyre.) Despite taking the internet handle Poe, American gothic literature is pretty much completely alien to me. I might have read a handful of other works that might be arguably gothic, but have not mentioned them here so I would not count them in a list of works that are mentioned in this essay and that I have personally read. The initial list was a semi-facetious argument for the presence of gothic architecture in gothic literature based on the titles alone. Note also my focus on gothic literature from the British Isles, with a mention of only two titles from Germany (Der Genius by Carl Grosse, translated into the English The Horrid Mysteries by Peter Will; and Der Geisterbanner: Eine Wundergeschichte aus mündlichen und schriftlichen Traditionen by Karl Friedrich Kahlert under the pen name Lawrence Flammenberg, translated into the English Necromancer of the Black Forest by Peter Teuthold that was first published in 1794) and only one from France (Notre-Dame de Paris 1482 by Victor Hugo). This is not to say that there was little to no Romanticist movement in Germany or France in the 18th and 19th centuries compared to Britain. Friedrich Maximilian Klinger's stageplay Sturm und Drang premiered in 1777 and lent its name to a proto-Romantic artistic era that was supremely Sublime and Big Mood Energy. The earliest French gothic novel I could find via a cursory search engine search was Jacques Cazotte's Le Diable Amoureux, 1772, and I deliberately selected Notre-Dame de Paris for mention instead to demonstrate the continued theme of architecture and variety in architecture: churches as well as castles, and to affirm the representation of disability in gothic literature because Quasimodo (a character in the book) is deaf and according to John Green had contacted spinal tuburculosis that left the character hunchbacked. I have not read any of Le Diable Amoureux, let alone the half that gave me the temerity to list Notre-Dame de Paris among these gothic works.

This sparseness is due to my own interest in the emergence of English-language gothic literature focused on Britain between the years 1789 and 1830, in keeping with Ian Mortimer's definition of the Regency era in Britain. That, and the information from the sources I have cited, are what I based the criteria that I offer for what makes a novel genre-compliant to gothic. The narrative psychology and historicist analyses of The Castle of Otranto as an outlier published earlier than the timeframe I confine myself to, is for another essay perhaps written by somebody else. Similarly, my argument for the lineage of picaresque heroes from Paul Clifford to The Scarlet Pimpernel, Don Diego "Zorro" de la Vega, and ultimately the angst-filled cinematic version of Bruce Wayne as overlapping the picaresque with the gothic is a blog post for another time. I have read some works by the Maquis Donatien Alphonse François de Sade and I utterly and unutterably abhor all of it, will the spectre of his abysmal depravity ever cease to haunt me—but I think I can make an argument for his works being gothic even as he argued for himself that they were not; I have no plans of doing so.

My main intention in writing this overview and criteria is to lay the groundwork for examining the overlap between Gothic as a genre and Dark Academia as a genre, which I aim to evaluate in future essays by using this criteria.

List of Works Mentioned Above

The Castle of Otranto by Horace Walpole (1764)

Le Diable Amoureux by Jacques Cazotte (1772)

The Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne by Ann Radcliffe (1789)

The Castle of Wolfenbach by Eliza Parsons (1793)

The Mysteries of Udolpho by Ann Radcliffe (1794)

Necromancer of the Black Forest by Lawrence Flammenberg (translated by Peter Teuthold, 1794)

The Horrid Mysteries by Carl Grosse (translated by Peter Will, 1796)

The Italian by Ann Radcliffe (1796)

The Mysterious Warning by Eliza Parsons (1796)

Clermont by Regina Maria Roche (1798)

The Midnight Bell by Francis Lathorn (1798)

Orphan of the Rhine by Eleanor Sleath (1798)

Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen (1818)

The Vampyre by John William Polidori (1819)

Paul Clifford by Edward Bulwer-Lytton (1830)

Notre-Dame de Paris 1482 by Victor Hugo (1831)

Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë (1847)

Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë (1847)

Carmilla by Sheridan Le Fanu (1872)

Dracula by Bram Stroker (1897)

The Werewolf by Clemence Housman (1896)

The Scarlet Pimpernel by Emma Orczy (1905)

Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys (1966)

The Moth Diaries by Rachel Klein (2002)

#dark academia #goth lit #Austenblogging #Northanger Abbey #← my bias #poe.txtwall

[jennycalendar]

literally where is my lesbian henry tilney. i need someone who is willing to watch me invent my own gothic novel and very patiently steer me away from walls bc i clearly have no idea what’s going on. local catherine morland looking for a lady who knows she is more emotionally intelligent than me but will let me think i am smarter than her while also gently making fun of me about it. they are SUCH goals.

#musings #austenblogging #i checked out a queer ya graphic novel version of northanger abbey and it made me miss them again #i know everyone is all about lizzydarcy or emmaknightley but i live in the land of catherine and henry.

[doctorjennifermelfi]

persuasion is so wild...imagine your ex who you're still crazy about showing up after 8 years, practically moving into your house, calling you old and haggard (you're 27) but then admitting that he's also still obsessed with you and that nobody compares 2 u, especially not the pretty young thing who suffered brain trauma literally throwing herself at him...love that

#persuasion #a 30 year old gets called an old lady close to death in this book #jane austen #I'm listening to the audible austen bundle that's why there has been so much austenblogging recently #and also because I am an old lady close to death i guess!!

[anghraine]

I’m obviously a big fan of bringing together major or minor characters from across Austen’s novels into one big Jane Austen Cinematic Universe. I do think, though, that there’s a sort of ... I don’t know if I’d say problem, but there’s an issue.

If you’ve got a world populated primarily or heavily by Austen’s own characters, I think the “everyone back then thought/did X” argument (though always problematic) becomes stronger than it really is, because it treats Austen’s characters as normative. This goes both ways; Austen’s characters become representative of the typical, and attitudes/conduct assumed to be typical are imposed onto Austen’s characters. 

What it tends to erase is the possibility that some of Austen’s characters—certainly not all, but some, esp among the central characters—are extraordinary people. Not necessarily in the melodramatic OTT sense, but in the sense that they’re in some way (usually many ways) atypical of the world around them, even as they’re bound up in it. 

Just going w/ P&P, Elizabeth and Darcy are very much embedded within the world they live in, but they don’t live demographically representative lives within it. There’s no point where most young ladies were like Elizabeth, or where most rich landlords were anything like Darcy. Some were! They’re not unrealistic as in beyond the realm of reasonable possibility. But they are beyond the realm of reasonable frequency. 

I think it’s more apparent that the characters are fairly unique people when you treat the novels as discrete continuities. Alternately, there’s the possibility of a really big world in which the cross-novel Austen characters are a minority who can thus be treated as the unusual people they are. But otherwise ... even though I’m really fond of the JACU, I think something pretty important can get lost in it.

#strier talks about how historically-minded critics tend to ignore the possibility that elements in fiction might be unusual or surprising #/in their own time/ #and how sometimes 'it seems to be saying this but it would be odd at the time' is just ... an odd thing. bc people write about odd things. #and it got me thinking about this #i remember mags at austenblog used to fight the good fight with this too #and be like ... yeah but just bc real life people usually did such and such doesn't mean it's how austen wrote her characters #anyway #austen blogging #austen fanwank #anghraine babbles #elizabeth bennet #fitzwilliam darcy #jane austen cinematic universe #only not cinematic. but anyway.

[marryat92]

Although it was written 10 years ago, I only just found this charming and informative blog post, about a story from an anthology of Jane Austen-inspired original fiction. The writer drew inspiration from Jane Austen's nautically-tinged novel Persuasion, and from Frederick Marryat's Peter Simple.

After you explained that Peter Simple was an Age of Sail novel written by an English Royal Navy officer, it all started to make sense. I knew that in addition to our shared passion for our “dear Jane” that you were a huge Captain Horatio Hornblower fan who had studied naval history and lore from the era. I was astonished that you were able to pull a plot element out of Peter Simple about sailors receiving family letters and selling them to their shipmates for entertainment and then make the leap to creating your story, “Heard of You,” about the early career of Austen’s Captain Wentworth and Admiral Croft.

I know exactly what scene this is in Peter Simple: midshipmen selling their correspondence (and bargaining over sisters at home) with their messmates.

The blog post goes on to mention the Royal Navy connections of Jane Austen, who had two brothers in the service, both of whom acheived flag rank in their long and successful careers. Virginia Woolf specifically connects the hero of Marryat's Peter Simple and the world of Jane Austen in "The Captain's Death Bed":

Peter quotes a letter from home and the other side of the scene appears; the solid land, England, the England of Jane Austen, with its parsonages, its country houses, its young women staying at home, its young men gone to sea; and for a moment the two worlds, that are so opposite and yet so closely allied, come together.

Captain Marryat himself admired Jane Austen's prose, going by an excerpt in his Life and Letters where he imagines that a revised version of Frank Mildmay "will be so improved that he may be permitted to stand on the same shelf with 'Pride and Prejudice,' or 'Sense and Sensibility.'" (But he was too busy with other projects to ever rework his first novel to Jane Austen-level quality).

I have already remarked that information about the Regency world put together by Jane Austen's large and dedicated fandom can be a boon to readers of Frederick Marryat. It's nice to see the Austen fans turning to Marryat for a contemporary (more or less) naval voice from the same cultural world.

#frederick marryat #captain marryat #age of sail #jane austen #virginia woolf #royal navy #literature #regency #peter simple #persuasion #frank mildmay #reading marryat #life and letters #the 1995 persuasion movie feels very marryat-esque

[austennews]

EMMA. Available for Streaming

We are hunkered down here at the fabulous high-tech AustenBlog World Headquarters, and maintaining proper social distancing. Dorothy has been basically locked in her garret watching the North and Southseries on repeat, occasionally emerging to make another pot of tea and mumbling something that sounds like, “Save us, Richard Armitage.” The Editrix is herself indulging in a re-watch, in order*, of…

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#EMMA. (2020 Film)

[thejgatsbykid]

i’m bewildered by the sudden influx of followers in the wake of my furious austenblogging but at the same time like. when better. bc i have to read all the books and a bunch of austen criticism this summer just so i can put together a proposal for my independent reading course much less actually like Do The Course and i’m just going to be yelling about her a lot so if there was ever a time for me to become vaguely rebranded as also an Austen Guy(tm) i guess it would be now

#said Jamie #I asked Gee if i should just lean into it and rebrand my blog or w/e and she’s like ‘idk i have no clue what people are into’ #and im like ‘yeah you just like me as a person so you’d be into my blog even if it became exclusively like #poorly lit photos of lizards or something’ and she’s like ‘yeah pretty much’ and honestly?? when will ur fave #what kind of loyalty #these tags are wholly unrelated to the post i just have a lot in my heart rn and it’s almost four am

[habitofjournaling]

Thank You, Jane

Today has been a rather melancholy and solemn day for me. When the anniversary of Austen’s death comes up every year, I rarely mark it on AustenBlog or anywhere else. To me, it’s not something to be celebrated. If Austen had lived her full threescore and ten or more, had written a couple dozen books, had lived a life long and full and successful, I think I would feel differently.  But her early…

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#Jane Austen

[saint-starflicker]

Nobody tagged me I just thought this would be fun.

9 Things!

1. three ships - Naoto Shirogane and Kanji Tatsumi; Lee Scoresby and Serafina Pekkala and Ruta Skadi but not Ruta Skadi with Lee Scoresby because I really think Ruta would eat Lee's rabbit just because she was bored and then find a way to keep Lee alive because that'd be the entertaining part and only witches would understand; Ivy Robinson and Tanya Garrett

2. first ever ship - Fox Mulder and Dana Scully

3. last song - "Writer in the Dark" by Lorde

4. last movie - The Secret Garden 2017 which was a mid-budget steampunk and I think it played with the source material in some interesting ways and obviously had so much care put into the set details and costumes; it's the best bad movie I have ever watched and I think it should be a camp classic

5. currently reading - This question caught me at the wrong time. I just finished reading Fledgling by Octavia E. Butler over the weekend and am taking a break between reads.

6. currently watching - nothing

7. currently consuming - Planning a gothic literature bingereading fest for the rest of 2023. I have never read anything by any of the Brontë sisters, or Ann Radcliffe whose works Jane Austen was such a fan of, so I want to catch up on those.

8. currently craving - French toast

9. 9 people to tag

#Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 4 #His Dark Materials #Bare: a Pop Opera #The X Files #The Secret Garden 2017 #Fledgling by Octavia Butler #goth lit #Austenblogging #foodposting

[jennycalendar]

i love how many different flavors of Idiot Man jane austen manages to display

#austenblogging #like they are DISTINCT

[jennycalendar]

actually my imaginary and ideal iteration of giles and jenny would have emma/knightley energy without question. CONSTANT bickering, the significantly younger lady talking very loudly about how she is never ever gonna get married or be in love, the older man kinda making the :/ face for most of canon because he would literally take a bullet for the most self involved idiot in the world (and then also he is kind of a patronizing asshole himself) like it is RIGHT THERE

#austenblogging #calendiles #i know this isn’t close to canon but it does sum up the way i like to interpret them. #i.e. the world’s tenderest and most intellectual mess

[jennycalendar]

fully darcy is so fucking funny like the fact that he is initially interpreted as Rude Angry Snob Man but really what’s happening is he’s trying to listen to a hot girl’s conversation because he hasn’t figured out how to talk to her yet and figures that just standing in the general vicinity is a laudable first step

#musings #austenblogging #celia reads pride and prejudice #or like REREADS but STILL

[jennycalendar]

every one of jane austen’s books has resonated with me thus far and i am not surprised that mansfield park is no exception now that i’m reading it under better circumstances. i am however extremely discomfited with how very neatly it depicts the difficulty and the invisibility of being a deeply compassionate and accommodating person and being surrounded by selfish, frivolous, cruel people who genuinely think they’re the pinnacle of virtue

#austenblogging #and the fact that she’s been repeatedly displaced and doesn’t feel at home like OKAY JANE! YOU CAN STOP NOW!

[jennycalendar]

my favorite line in sense and sensibility is always and forever from that scene where elinor’s politely putting up with robert ferrars and he goes off about cottage architecture and this is followed by “Elinor agreed to it all, for she did not think he deserved the compliment of rational opposition.” like i just....i love her so fucking much. i really do. she is the actual austenian representation of the :/ face at every point in time. she delights me.

#austenblogging #blowing kisses 2 elinor dashwood! always! #her very polite judginess delights me #like she is constantly like. MARIANNE do not say the rude things that i myself am silently thinking. that's Not Good Manners.

[jennycalendar]

still thinking about how for my mansfield park thinkpiece i wrote a very long academic professional piece about how i think edmund bertram is terrible

#austenblogging #best part was my professor going ''yes. :)''

[jennycalendar]

northanger abbey i LOVE YOU. i took a gothic lit class a year ago so i am placed in a really uniquely excellent position of being in on the joke.

#austenblogging #i am so fucking enamored #this might actually be my favorite. it’s so clever and incisive