The prevalent atmosphere is a doom and gloomy one, in order for incomprehensible situations to take place. Some of the most known Gothic novels are Frankenstein, Dracula, Wuthering Heights, stories written by Edgar Allen Poe. According to Crystal B. Lake, the Gothic literature expose and play with the unknown, hidden parts of society or of ourselves hence what makes it so terrifying is the fact that it brings into the light, it gives a voice to
“The Gothic” English Literature helps the world escape reality. English Literature can be Funny, Scary, Serious or Factual. But Is Gothic Literature a big part of English Literature? Now some people hate the Gothic Genre and never want to take a chance and leave certain Genres to read it. But the Desire to be terrified is as much part of Human Nature as the need to Laugh (“The Gothic Novel” Brendan Hennessy Pg 324).
Throughout history, there have been many controversies concerning books causing them to either be challenged or straightforwardly banned. For a lot of these books, they are banned in certain regions due to viewer discretion, such as the case with the mature topics noted in J.D. Salinger’s, The Catcher in the Rye. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, a picaresque novel by Mark Twain, however, is generally distinguished as a racist, due to diction, and for that reason one of the most challenged books of all time. Despite the negative connotation surrounding banned books, such as The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, their people who will argue the book's impact on the world.
This stems from the duality between “the cult of beauty and the self […] [and] the expression of profound pessimism, a tendency to focus on the imagery of doom, decay, and a society in decline”15 which prevailed in the last decades of the nineteenth century. The label “Decadence” has been, sometimes falsely, attributed to many works produced in the last decade of the nineteenth century. It is indeed a term that had been coined by the public of the time to label the works which shocked them, or as Dowling puts it, works with “sensational or lurid overtones.”16 It is such a problematic term because it implies that all the works perceived by the public as sensational can be gathered in one group thus reducing Decadence to mere perversity and indecency. The generalization on the part of the public, and consequently on the part of critics, undermines the diversity of art that was produced during the fin-de-siècle era. However, Symons’s article on Decadence is not to be entirely disregarded in favour of his book on Symbolism: in his article, he does mention that Decadence is made of two art movements, which are Symbolism and Impressionism.
He was different than other romantic writers in the sense that he didn’t write about the love or romance you would typically see, he wrote about death, torture, and mystery. Nathaniel Hawthorne’s main writing traits consist of a fascination with death, the supernatural, the gothic, and the mysterious, moods that include oddness, fear, sense of terror, the gothic and the grotesque, and has a knowledge of people and life based on deep, intuitive understanding. Nathaniel Hawthorne was a romantic author who wrote against the Puritan ideas. Puritan people didn’t like his writing styles and his stories because he disagreed with their way of life. He viewed the Puritans as hypocrites and being religious, sexist, and afraid of God’s judgement.
In Dracula, Stoker portrays the presence of good vs evil by contrasting the two in a straightforward and odd manner. The characters interact having different sides, but sometimes couldn’t tell if a specific character has a personality of goodness in themselves or not. The main character in the novel, Dracula, is considered evil. His appearance and expressions that appear seem to have an evil sense to the others characters. The book also shows elements of gothicism, when the setting starts to turn into the daytime to nighttime quickly, which represents the role of light going against darkness.
The gothic villain in modern gothic novel develops and takes a variety of possibilities. In Rebecca, there is no specific gothic villain, multiple characters have a gothic villain quality, it is not easy to determine which one of them is the gothic villain. If we consider Mrs. de Winter as the helpless heroine, so the gothic villain is the one who peruses or threats her and this includes: Rebecca, Mrs. Danvers, and even Maxim. Starting with Rebecca , though she does not appear in the whole novel as a living character but she is considered as a gothic villain in a shape of ghost who haunts the heroine and makes her in a state of horror and risk. Rebecca is described as a demonic character by Maxim: I hated her, I tell you, our marriage was a farce from the very first.
feeling : The word ʻ heimlich ’ is not unambiguous , but belongs to two sets of idea ,which, without being contradictory , are yet very different: on the one hand it means what is familiar and agreeable , and on the other, what is concealed and kept out of sight … everything is unheimlich that out to have remained secret and hidden out has come to out . 57 When speaking about psychology in gothic literature, it is essential to mention Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849) , the American innovative gothic writer of the nineteenth century. Poe’s contribution to the gothic genre is majestic. His internal analysis of the psychology of fear in his characters in The Fall of the House of Users (1839); The Black Cat (1843) and others narratives, opened out the gothic to the exploration of mental collapse . Poe was interested in madness, detective stories, and has perceived themes like death and decay.58 A new innovation to the gothic that appears in the mid-nineteenth century is the Sensation novels.
These gothic novels showcased events that were about the supernatural and were laced with violent passions, horror, terror and exaggerations. The typical story was far from the shores of rationalistic England, it was rather somewhere in faraway south. The name of Ann Radcliff is associated with this type of fiction. Italy kept returning as the background of these fictions. But geography is not the only factor.
The genre of Gothic writing is necessary for people to understand the depth of what people are feeling in a deep way. Gothic writing cannot be described in a way that cannot be described in a way seen with normal writing; however, gothic writing allows this point to be exaggerated. Gothic writing is a genre of writing that was mainly popularized in the Southern United States and other countries have had the same type of writing but it was not classified as Gothic. This theme allows for the points of certain writers that include: William Faulkner, Flannery O’Connor, and Lu Xun, to get their points across. William Faulkner wrote the short story, “A Rose for Emily” which follows the life of Miss Emily Gierson and as we follow her life in a strange order we learn that she lives with something wrong with her head.