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Gothic Literature From: Encyclopedia of Gothic Literature. Scary Stories

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Gothic Literature From: Encyclopedia of Gothic Literature. Scary Stories Gothic Literature From: Encyclopedia of Gothic Literature. Scary stories are indigenous to human artistry. Out of curiosity about the secrets of nature, human behavior, and unexplained bumps in the night, from early times people have investigated the mystic and aberrant and shared their findings about the unknown. When literary trends fled the high-toned, artificial sanctuary of the Age of Reason, the backlash against regularity and predictability sent literature far into the murky past to retrieve traditional folksay about intriguing mysteries. The most accessible model of imaginative narrative derived from the Middle Ages, a fertile period textured with contrasts—great productivity and abominable crimes, piety and religious barbarism, admirable soldiery and the doings of witches, scientific innovation and the dabblings of alchemists, royal ritual and the danse macabre, and bold architecture to suit church and civic needs. The period thrived on a grand cultural exchange as wandering rabbis visited distant enclaves of Judaism, traders imported the wonders of Asia, and Christian crusaders tramped the long road to Jerusalem. The writings generated from the period range from saint lore and "Salve, Regina" to Reynard the Fox fables, Chinese spirit tales, troubadour love plaints, and stories of shape-shifting. Like finely stitched tapestry, the strands of medievalism held firm, lending their color and decorative meanderings to the late 1700s, when traditional gothic literature made its formal debut. As is often true with something new and different, analysis discloses familiar elements at the heart of originality. Thus, the 18th-century writings of Abbé Prévost, the graveyard poets, Tobias Smollett, and Horace Walpole presented oddments culled from Asian storytelling, Scheherazade's cyclic stories from The Arabian Nights, Charles Perrault's "Beauty and the Beast," Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, and the bloody tragedies of the Renaissance stage. With scraps of picaresque literature, episodic adventure lore, and supernatural balladry, the gothic school returned to the wilderness and the architecture of the distant past for night sounds and shadows on which to anchor tales of terror. The critic Anna Laetitia Barbauld legitimized such nerve-tingling page-turners for their stimulus to the emotions and intellect. Buoyed by the example of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Friedrich von Schiller, and the German romantics, the English-speaking world created its own pulse-pumping narratives, beginning with William Beckford's Vathek, Sophia Lee's The Recess, Charlotte Smith's The Old Manor House, and the pace-setting The Mysteries of Udolpho by Ann Radcliffe, matriarch of the English gothic movement. As with any organic matter, gothic literature flexed its tentacles in varied territory to touch the scandalous, perilous, and outré—German bandit lore, stalking in William Godwin's Caleb Williams, escapism in the abbey and castle novels of Francis Lathom and Regina Roche, domestic battery in Punch-and-Judy street shows, and the shocking merger of piety with sex crimes in Matthew Gregory Lewis's The Monk, a high point of anti-Catholic daring. For the semiliterate underclass, a new industry in gothic bluebooks and penny shockers offered scaled-down versions of classic stories and spin-offs of bestselling bodice rippers. Simultaneous with the flowering of popular pulp fiction were the writings of England's romantics—the nature-based odes and allegories of John Keats and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the stirring sensibilities of Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley, and the emergence of vampire tales by John Polidori and Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley. One aspect that the era's writers had in common was the idealism of youth: Monk Lewis was 15 when he began imitating German ballads; Percy Shelley was still in school when he completed Zastrozzi; Mary Shelley was 21 when she published Frankenstein; Keats wrote The Eve of St. Agnes at 24. A significant factor in the untidy burgeoning of gothicism was the interchange of themes and styles as English writers devoured contemporary French romances, the Grimms' Teutonic tales, and German doppelgänger motifs, both in the original and English translations. Europeans thrilled to the frontier gothic of North America, beginning with Charles Brockden Brown's eerie Wieland and advancing to racial warfare in John Richardson's Wacousta and the serial murders in Robert Montgomery Bird's Nick of the Woods, the first overt testimony of white America's intent to eradicate Native Americans from the frontier. Decades before Sigmund Freud provided a paradigm for the human psyche, echoes of disturbing behaviors forced readers of gothic literature to interpret subtexts of prejudice, classism, and abnormality in thought and action: in the motivation for James Hogg's The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner, and in Caroline Lamb's Ada Reis, James Fenimore Cooper's The Last of the Mohicans, Goethe's Faust, Sir Walter Scott's Ivanhoe, and Charles Maturin's Melmoth the Wanderer. Gothic literature made its way along the low road with the lengthy serial Varney the Vampire and Minerva Press crowd-pleasers, and the high road of fine writing by Edward Bulwer-Lytton, Théophile Gautier, Nikolai Gogol, Hans Christian Andersen, Vladimir Odoevsky, and Edgar Allan Poe, the star gothicist of the 1830s and 1840s. At mid-century, in The Scarlet Letter and The House of the Seven Gables, Nathaniel Hawthorne turned his thoughts on New England's late 17th-century witch persecutions into soul-deep musings on the devastation wrought by secret sin and public shame. His friend Herman Melville ventured into the perils of vengeance with Moby-Dick, a sea epic that peels away layers of anguish and striving to get at the core of an obsession so virulent that it wipes out all but one of a whaler's crew and sends the ship to the briny depths. As cities began to fester from the pollution and ethical rot instigated by the Industrial Revolution, Charles Dickens focused less on individual fault than on society's failings. His rage at apathy in the genteel class inspired one of Victorian literature's finest ghost stories, A Christmas Carol, and empowered Oliver Twist, Bleak House, Great Expectations, and A Tale of Two Cities with fictional glimpses of civil dysfunction and international chaos. For the first time in literary history, female writers flourished along the book industry's continuum as writers, publishers, editors, adapters, and translators of gothic works. Reared among the literary elite, Christina Rossetti presented female relationships in The Goblin Market, a charmingly macabre fairy tale of menacing trolls and the rescue of one sister by another without the aid of a male. In 1847, two of the Brontë sisters produced a literary epiphany with a pair of trendsetters, Charlotte's Jane Eyre and Emily's Wuthering Heights. Their respective heroines, Jane Eyre and Catherine Earnshaw, escaped the shackles of patriarchy to actualize career and personal longings, both at considerable cost. In New England, Harriet Beecher Stowe examined a subset of female enslavement in Uncle Tom's Cabin, an abolitionist melodrama. The second half of the 19th century advanced gothic motifs beyond the trite maiden-in-the- castle scenarios of the 1790s to mature artistry elucidating humanistic themes. Charles Baudelaire, a disciple of Poe, voiced urban terrors of death and decay in Les Fleurs du Mal, a symbolist verse classic. Wilkie Collins capitalized on increasing unrest at immigration and city crime in The Woman in White, the prototype sensation novel. Subsequent shockers abandoned medieval atrocities to divulge realistic violence, forced marriage, incest, bigamy, inheritance theft, illegitimacy, dissipation, and spousal abuse, the scenarios in domestic novels by Ellen Wood and Mary Elizabeth Braddon. Victor Hugo turned the standard crime tale to social purpose by exposing continued injustice to the underclass in Les Misérables, a novel that reaches its dramatic climax in the sewers of Paris. American gothic evolved a unique study of human guile and cruelty. In the Mississippi Delta, George Washington Cable spoke for both the Creole and the slave in "Jean-ah Poquelin" and in "Bras Coupé," a hero tale of slave coercion nested in a tormented biracial saga, The Grandissimes. The Atlantic Coast elite found a spokesman in Henry James, author of The Portrait of a Lady and a perplexing face-to-face encounter with self in "The Jolly Corner." His elegant prose stimulated the imagination of Edith Wharton, who crafted her own spectral tales as well as the domestic horrors of Ethan Frome, a novella replete with unrequited love amid unstinting toil and despair. As Europe elevated literary standards with the refined storytelling of Guy de Maupassant, the short story moved far from polite society to the visceral trauma of contes cruels (cruel tales) by Villiers de L'Isle-Adam and the writing team of Émile Erckmann and Louis Alexandre Chatrian. Expatriate Lafcadio Hearn turned translation of Asian tales into an art. The Scottish storyteller Robert Louis Stevenson fled a sickly body by writing the imaginative pirate tale Treasure Island and the gothic masterpiece of the 1880s, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, a psychodrama of lethal duality in the human spirit. A contemporary, the Anglo-Indian Rudyard Kipling, presented his own stark images of the split persona in his colonial short fiction. Such Kipling stories as "The Mark of the Beast," "Without Benefit of Clergy," and "The Phantom Rickshaw" question a "have" nation's right to exploit the global "have-nots." The query, posed decades earlier in Lewis's "The Anaconda," refused to disappear as gothic writers W. W. Jacobs and Arthur Conan Doyle infused texts with disturbing hints of the evils imported from subject nations. Doyle's command of logic suited the birth of Sherlock Holmes, one of the world's most revered fictional sleuths, whose knowledge of world exotica and criminal motivation wowed a huge fan base on both sides of the Atlantic.
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