I’ve long been afflicted by a strain of Romanticism that I’ve found myself unable to shake. It has manifested as a preoccupation with equality and autonomy, a respect for nature, “an everlasting itch for things remote,” an interest in all things occult, and a thirst for the sublime. Mine is the Romanticism of the Luddite, of William Blake’s “London,” not the nationalist Romanticism of the late 19th Century that birthed the horrors of the 20th.
It’s strange to think how early in my life I began forming these political and aesthetic preferences. One of my earliest memories of reading involves Hamlet and “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” which were collected in volumes of literature that were part of a 1960s encyclopedia set we had on the shelf.
I don’t think six-year-old me ever got past Act I scene 1 of Hamlet, and I’m sure I understood probably less than half of what I read, but I got enough from it to form a strong mental image that has stuck with me all these years: a guardsman on a castle’s battlements, gazing out into a foggy night (does the text ever say that it’s foggy? It’s a foggy night in my memory). Another man emerges from the darkness, and they speak of an apparition, a ghost that looks just like the dead king.
Unlike Hamlet, “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” had glossing in the margins summarizing the story, which made it more comprehensible to me. I was able to get the gist of that tale: an old sailor crashes a wedding, compelled to tell his story. While his ship is stuck on a windless sea, he kills an albatross. This is bad luck among sailors, so they hang it around his neck. Soon after, the ship is beset by the Flying Dutchman, a haunted hulk aboard which sail a skeleton and a creepy pale woman: Death and Nightmare Life-in-Death.
My love of fantasy and horror began there, with two stories I could barely understand that nevertheless created strong images in my mind that I remember to this day. But even as I read all of the science fiction and fantasy I could get my hands on, even as I studied Romanticism and Victorian literature in school, I never went deep into Gothic literature. As much as Romanticism’s critiques and observations of early capitalism has informed my worldview, and as much as I love writers influenced by the Romantic and Gothic movements, ranging from Poe to Peake, I thought I’d go back and read some of those Gothic classics that I missed and see what I can take from them.
The Victorian Gothic, whether realist post-Gothic like Charlotte Bronte’s Villette or The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins, more explicitly supernatural works like The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde or Dracula, speaks to the spectrality of life under capitalism, to the anxieties surrounding the slipperiness of identity as people once tied to a plot of land became an unmoored industrial working class. I’m interested in seeing how (and if) these themes play out in the earliest Gothic novels, written as they were in the early days of the Industrial Revolution and both before and after the French Revolution.
Most of my favorite fantasy novels have traces of the Gothic in their DNA, some more than others: Gormenghast (more simply a 20th Century Gothic novel than a fantasy novel), The Book of the New Sun, The Lord of the Rings, Tales from the Flat Earth, The Locked Tomb series; even Dune, with its mysterious nuns, gloomy ancient castles, secret and convoluted lineages, and scheming aristocrats is a Gothic novel deep in its bones. My favorite sf film, Alien, is Gothic in space, with an old space ship and an alien playing the role of the old castle and ghost, the corporation replacing the church as the corrupt and hypocritical institution of authority.
Even if you see little direct influence of the Gothic in fantasy, the lineage is there, from chivalric romances and One Thousand and One Nights to Gothic and Romantic art and literature to Edgar Allan Poe to ghost stories and weird fiction to the separation of science fiction, fantasy, and horror into distinct genres. While fantasy is its own thing, you can find in the Gothic the source of many themes, aesthetics, and narrative norms found in the fantasy genre.
Both Gothic and Romantic literature were interested in the sublime: an expansive, excessive feeling that overwhelms understanding and emotion. The best example of the literary sublime, for me, is Percy Bysshe Shelley’s poem “Mont Blanc.” Imagine living before photographs and never seeing a picture of the massive snowy peaks of the Alps. Now imagine hiking up a hill and being met with this scene:
How overwhelmed would you be? How overcome by awe, by the beauty of nature and the vastness of the world would you be? Would you be paralyzed by your own cosmic insignificance, or enraptured by the divine in nature and your connection to it, or both at the same time? That’s the sublime. That confusing, overwhelming feeling is what Shelley captures in “Mont Blanc.”
The everlasting universe of things
Flows through the mind, and rolls its rapid waves,
Now dark—now glittering—now reflecting gloom—
Now lending splendour, where from secret springs
The source of human thought its tribute brings
Of waters—with a sound but half its own,
Such as a feeble brook will oft assume,
In the wild woods, among the mountains lone,
Where waterfalls around it leap for ever,
Where woods and winds contend, and a vast river
Over its rocks ceaselessly bursts and raves.
While the Romantic tended to focus on the latter feeling—the divine in nature—the Gothic located the overwhelming awe of the sublime in a derangement of the senses, probing the limits of rationality and stirring emotions through suspense, shock, and terror. We can imagine the Romantic giving birth to fantasy (by way of Sir Walter Scott’s historical novels) and the Gothic evolving into horror and the weird, but elements of the Gothic and the Romantic mix more freely in these genres.
Ultimately, my goal with this project is to locate the origins of fantasy in the Gothic and think about how these centuries-old books can help us conceptualize and write fantasy (and horror and weird fiction) today.
The Gothic novels I’ll be reading over the next month or so are:
- Vathek by William Beckford (1768)
- The Romance of the Forest by Ann Radcliffe (1791)
- The Monk by Matthew Gregory Lewis (1796)
- Zofloya by Charlotte Dacre (1806)
A more comprehensive study would begin with Otranto and end with Melmoth, from the first Gothic novel to the novel considered the last of the first wave of the Gothic, but I want to read a few different kinds of Gothic novels that I haven’t already read. Every week or so I’ll be back with a critique or review or just some thoughts about each book.
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