The Eighteenth-Century Gothic Novel - An Overview

The Gothic novel emerged in the latter half of the eighteenth-century with the publication of The Castle of Otranto by Horace Walpole in 1764. This novel inaugurated a genre of literature which was preoccupied with the supernatural and the macabre. The Castle of Otranto is set in a distant medieval past. It tells the story of Manfred, a lord who attempts to preserve his lineage by marrying his daughter-in-law, Isabella, after his son has been crushed to death by a giant helmet that has inexplicably fallen out of the sky. The novel was originally published pseudonymously and professed to be a translation of a story dating back to the crusades. It features ghostly manifestations, and revelations of identity, characteristic of much Gothic fiction.

The next major Gothic novel was The Old English Baron by Clara Reeve. This was written partly in response to The Castle of Otranto, a novel Reeve considered absurd. Walpole riposted by describing Reeve's novel as insipid and tedious. However Reeve's literary intentions were similar to Walpole's in that she aimed to merge the form of the ancient romance with that of the modern novel.

The genre arguably reached its peak in the 1790s, the decade which saw the publication of The Mysteries of Udolpho, the fourth of Ann Radcliffe's major Gothic novels. The Mysteries of Udolpho refined many of the narrative tropes set down by Walpole in The Castle of Otranto, such as the crumbling castle situated in a wild and perilous landscape. However whereas the portrayal of Walpole's castle appears rather indistinct and perfunctory, Radcliffe renders Castle Udolpho with an intensively vivid detail. The stock protagonists of many Gothic novels - such as the sensitive heroine; her impetuous lover; and a tyrannical older man - are apparent in the principal characters in Radcliffe's tale, in the form of the heroine Emily St Aubert; her lover Valancourt; and the villainous Count Montoni.

The Monk, by Matthew Lewis, is another seminal Gothic text. The story revolves around Ambrosio, the eponymous monk, and his gruesome downfall, brought about by his struggles in trying to balance monastic obligations and personal ambitions - it is a violent tale of sexual obsession and murder. One striking distinction between The Monk and The Mysteries of Udolpho is Lewis's handling of the supernatural. Whereas Radcliffe gives rational explanations for her ghostly occurrences, Lewis remains firmly within the realms of the fantastical - at the end of The Monk, the devil himself makes an appearance. Another notable distinction is the tone of these novels. Lewis concentrates on the shocking and brutal aspects of his story while Radcliffe appears to be more concerned with terrifying, rather than horrifying the reader. This distinction has led critics to consider Lewis's The Monk as a major representative of a so-called 'masculine Gothic' while Radcliffe's work is typical of a more 'feminine' school of writing.

The major Gothic novels of the late eighteenth-century had scores of imitators, mostly of debatable quality. Several of these books are alluded to in Northanger Abbey, Jane Austen's famous burlesque of the genre. While the heroine of that novel, Catherine Morland, is reading The Mysteries of Udolpho, her friend Isabella Thorpe (a connoisseur of Gothic novels) recommends a list of 'horrid novels' they should read together. This list of novels are known as the 'Northanger Canon' and for many years it was thought that their lurid titles were of Austen's own invention, until scholars revealed they did in fact exist.

The popularity of the Gothic genre began to wane by the middle years of the following century, although its influence is still apparent in many of the more realist novels of that time. Jane Eyre, Villette, and Wuthering Heights all feature Gothic elements and the aesthetic is also apparent in some of the more fanciful scenes of many of Charles Dickens's novels.