The 1790s are often considered the heyday of gothic literature; however, the genre has never fallen out of popularity since. In fact, it has seen constant revivals throughout its history, with many important Gothic works written in the 19th century, such as Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886), and Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897). Several momentous changes were occurring in scientific and religious thought in the era which were reflected in Gothic literature of 19th century Britain and America.
Considering religion first, the rise of modernity had already been witnessing a weakening in faith since the early Victorian period. The institution of the church no longer held the primacy it did up to the 18th century. We see this anxiety about loss of faith reflected in the works of late 19th and early 20th century writers working outside the Gothic tradition as well, such as Matthew Arnold and T. S. Eliot. As the sea of faith retreated, it revealed many bestial horrors in its wake. In Gothic literature, this anxiety manifests itself with the entrance of the supernatural and horrific. No benign God is out there to save the victims of Gothic horror and bonds of family and community are often violated. According to Ann B. Tracy in The Gothic Novel 1790-1830: Plot Summaries and Index Motifs:
The world of Gothic fiction is characterized by a chronic sense of apprehension and the premonition of impending but unidentified disaster. The Gothic world is the fallen world, the vision of fallen man, living in fear and alienation, haunted by images of his mythic expulsion, by its repercussions, and by an awareness of his unavoidable wretchedness. ... Gothic heroes and heroines are on their own, stumbling alone, sometimes in foreign countries, through appalling complexities of decision and action, obliged to find their own solutions or go under; estrangement from family ties is their normal condition. ... Protagonists are frequently orphans, or they are foundlings or adopted, their family origins mysterious.
Shockingly, abbeys and churches themselves become the scene of many a Gothic novel, with priests and monks as the perpetrators of violence. Even though most of these works have medieval settings, with a strong air of the “dark ages” about them, the anxiety about loss of grace and faith and the critique of the church was all too contemporary. God is present in Gothic works but more as a shadowy figure with not too much power or with a power revealed only at the very end of the novel as a plot device. For instance, in Frankenstein, Victor prays to God to destroy his monster only when he gets a full measure of the horror he has created. This crisis of faith was accompanied by the rise in science and increased exploration into the psyche. With the understanding of the psyche, there came the realization that evil is not located outside, a la Satan, but within, and that is what made it all the more horrific.
In the traditional, dual view of the universe, God is the font of all good or the Summum bonum (Latin for highest good), whereas Satan is the home of evil. Humans who strayed from goodness were often driven to do so by Satan. However, with modernity and advances in a new science called psychology, it was becoming clearer that human nature itself was capable of great evil. Doppelgangers or doubles, a very popular trope in Gothic literature, are a clear manifestation of this realization. Dr. Jekyll is also Mr. Hyde, and the monster is the alter ego of Frankenstein. Evil is the flip side of good.
Although Sigmund Freud’s theory of the unconscious was still in the future, other important developments in the study of psychology were underway in the 19th century. For instance, the German scientist Wilhelm Wundt opened the world’s first psychology lab in 1879 at the University of Leipzig. Apart from psychology, the other science which had a huge impact on 19th century society was evolutionary biology. Charles Darwin’s The Origin of the Species, published in 1859, completely upturned the creation myths of various religions. Darwin put forward the theory that man was not created in God’s image but evolved from apes. To the Gothic imagination, this implied humans could move between species and thus even achieve monster-hood.
The anxiety about creating monsters was accompanied by a fear of physical deformities. We see this anxiety surface in works such as H. G. Wells’s The Island of Dr Moreau (1896), in which Dr Moreau performs vivisections on humans and experiments on beasts to turn them into humanoid creatures and in The Strange Case, where the evil Hyde is described as bestial and “ape-like.” The chief fear which Gothic literature expresses here is that if humans could go up the evolutionary ladder, they could also slide down it. Gothic literature of the period thus mirrored the deep fear Victorians felt about the very society they were creating. This is especially apparent in the form of figures like Frankenstein, Dr. Moreau, and Aylmer in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “The Birthmark” (1843), all symbolizing caution against the pitfalls of technology and of man trying to play God. Victor creates a monster; Aylmer, in perfecting nature, kills his wife, the symbol of nature at its purest; and Dr. Moreau inverts the natural order, creating an island of horrors.
https://epublications.marquette.edu/gothic_religion/
https://www.usask.ca/english/frank/gothtrad.htm
At the time gothic literature became popular, faith in traditional institutions was waning. The Enlightenment brought about increased scientific discoveries and knowledge, and that sometimes caused religious belief to fade. Numerous major revolutions also indicated that people were becoming weary of the hierarchical class system and monarchical style of government.
Gothic literature upends both religion and scientific discoveries because it engages with the supernatural and the mysterious. The gothic wants to believe that not everything can be explained. In that way it is closer to religious faith than to science, but it also differs from religion because it indicates that people can be driven by dark motives. Some people also think that belief in the occult defies traditional institutionalized religion. It defies science simply because the gothic wants to hold on to a sense of the unknown in the world and to explore how people react, psychologically, to encounters with the strange and the mysterious.
The gothic is also a great genre of literature for allowing readers to work through some of their fears. Often, gothic novels (think Ann Radcliffe's The Mysteries of Udolpho) resolve the mystery in the end: there was no supernatural, evil force. However, the protagonist is able to exorcise her fears through the process, and the reader can do the same.
No comments:
Post a Comment