In Our Time - Gothic

Episode Date: January 4, 2001

Horace Walpole and then Anne Radcliffe appeared to have triggered an anti-enlightenment movement: the Gothic that swept in Coleridge, two Shelleys, Byron, the Brontés, Walter Scott and Dickens, innumerable painters and architects, and even designed the Palace of Westminster itself.In 1765 Horace Walpole bewitched an unprepared public with the first ever Gothic novel The Castle of Ottranto. The poet Thomas Gray complained the novel made him “afraid to go to bed o’ nights”, and wind swept battlements, mysterious apparitions and armour that goes clang in the night has haunted the dungeons of popular culture ever since. But Gothic is more that novels, and from under its swirling cassock the Gothic Revival in architecture became the state style for an Empire, and the high camp of The Monk reached the acme of seriousness under the influence of John Ruskin. So how did the Gothic style manage to both sensationalise the public and form, quite literally the pillars of the establishment? Any why does a style forged in the spectral shadows of the Ages of Enlightenment still hold so such a secure position in popular culture today.With Chris Baldick, Professor of English at Goldsmiths College, London and author of In Frankenstein’s Shadow; A N Wilson, novelist, biographer, journalist and author of God’s Funeral; Emma Clery, senior lecturer in the English Department at Sheffield Hallam University and author of The Rise of Supernatural Fiction.

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk forward slash radio four. I hope you enjoy the programme. Hello, in 1764 Horace Walpole bewitched an unprepared public with what's been claimed as the first ever Gothic novel, the Castle of Atranto.

The poet Thomas Gray complained, the novel made him afraid to go to bed on nights and wind-swept battlements, mysterious apparitions, and armour that goes clang in the night have haunted the dungeons of popular culture ever since. But Gothic is more than novels, and from under its swirling cassock, the Gothic revival in architecture

became the state style for our empire, and the high camp of the monk reached the acme of seriousness under the influence of John Ruskin. So how did the Gothic style manage both to enthrall the public with sensation and form quite literally the pillars of the establishment? And why does a style forged in this spectrum?

shadows of the Age of Enlightenment still hold so secure a position in popular culture today. With me to discuss the history of the Gothic is Chris Baldick, Professor of English at Girlsmith's College London University, an author of Frankenstein Shadow. Also with me is E.J. Cleary from Sheffield Hallam University, author of The Rise of Supernatural Fiction, and the writer A.N. Wilson, author of Eminent Victorians and God's funeral. Chris Baldick, when Horace Walpole published the Castle of Atranto,

He pretended it had been written by an Italian priest in the 12th century. Why did he do that? It was part of a game he was playing, really, at the Castle of O'Tranto. We shouldn't imagine is something really terrifying. It's a kind of sport. Walpole was an antiquarian who liked playing around with things medieval or things slightly later than medieval. So that when he published the Castle of Atranto,

certain elements of it are playing around. It's not truly terrifying. He wanted to do a kind of spoof, a kind of forgery. There was a lot of forgery going on in the late 18th century literature, Thomas Chatterton and others, pretending to have discovered old manuscript. It gives it an air of something really antique, which, of course, it wasn't,

some curio from the past that had never been seen before, a window into the medieval world of cruelty and superstition. For those who haven't read it, can you briefly outline what these stories, the Castle of the Tranto? Yes, it's quite a creaky, story, it's pseudo-Shakespearean in a way and it comes in five parts but it's about a wicked

aristocrat who has usurped the principality of Atranto from the true line of princes. His son is bizarrely killed by a falling statue whereupon who decides he has to continue the family line

so that his family will possess Atranto forever. In doing so he attempts to marry his prospective daughter in law, which is, by most definitions, incestuous, chases around the castle and she escapes through various hidden passages, and eventually he comes to a sticky end. And the lover of the heroine turns out to be the true air of Atranto and all ends happily. Has that been the template for Gothic fiction ever since?

In certain respects, the essentials remain fairly true, particularly two elements. One is the constricted environment, usually a medieval castle or monastery, or similar sinister old building. And the other is the persecuted heroine who is beset on all sides by fears, real or imaginary, that she's going to be put through something ranging from murder or rape through to forced marriage or forcible entry into a convent. Emma Cleary, why do you think the Middle Ages were so attractive to people in this country at the end of the 18th century? Well, attractive is possibly not the right word for it.

There was certainly a fascination with the medieval past as a contrast with the present. It was, if you like, the shadow of modernity. So there was an attempt to look back to this past as a way of defining the features of the present. Before Warpole got going with his revival of literary Gothic, there were probably three separate meanings of Gothic. It's quite a complex and amorphous word with many meanings. And around this time, principally they were negative. There was the sense of Gothic as a history of the Goths destroying the classical Roman Empire.

And this was, of course, a specifically enlightenment nightmare. There was more neutral meaning of Gothic as unfashionable, as something obsolete. and this related to neoclassical taste, the aesthetic branch of the Enlightenment. And then there was a more positive meaning of the Gothic past of Britain, the idea that the invading Goths in the Dark Ages had brought to Britain a constitutional form of government and a spirit of liberty, which needed to be preserved in the present. So there was paradoxical meanings floating about at the time that Walpole picked it up.

Did Walpole pick up on Edmund Burke's argument in his ideas on the sublime and the beautiful arguments about pain and terror? I quote a sentence he said, Pain and Terror, quote, are capable of producing delight, a sort of delightful horror, a seat of tranquility tinged with terror. You can see how that goes through to Coleridge, for instance. But is it given a spin by the Gothic writers? Oh, absolutely, yes. Walpole certainly knew of Burke's inquiry and the theories of the sublime. and, I mean, he wasn't absolutely the first to try and create effects of the sublime in literature.

The pre-romantic poets, Collins, William Collins, Thomas Gray, were experimenting with effects of the sublime already, effects of terror. But the difference is that Walpole in the Castle of Atranto set out on this new endeavor to combine effects of the modern novel, for instance, realistic characterization with the ancient Roe. romance and elements of the supernatural, most notably. So he was really attaching the idea of the sublime to the supernatural, a revival of supernatural fiction. Ian Wilson, do you think we should see this fantastical side of the Gothic as a reaction against the Enlightenment? Is that how you said?

Well, I think he probably is in many senses. If you think of Gibbons' decline and fall of the Roman Empire, for example, he describes twice, once in his autobiography, once in the book itself, sitting in the ruins of the chapter, the ruins of, for an enlightenment person, classical civilization, the ruins of an embodiment of reason, really. And seeing these Chapuchin friars, wandering where Cicero had once walked and where Caesar had once ruled, singing as far as Gibbon is concerned, their superstitious mumbo-jumbo, their Gothic Latin, their dog Latin. These sandaled creeps, as far as gibbon as concerned, triumphing over the forces of reason.

And that's very much, I think, how a man of Gibbon's generation would have seen the Dothic in the way that we've been distressing it. Do you think that someone like Anne Radcliffe with a mistress of Adolfo, which was in 1794, wasn't it? That was a bigger success than Walpole's book and could be said to really, as it were, got the thing going in a rather public way. Do you think there's any sense I've read that she was trying to, not consciously perhaps, but in some way trying to bring imagination back from the scientist

sprack from Newton back into literature. Is there anything in that? I would have thought there was an element of that, but she was a very, very young woman when she was writing these novels. And so I don't think one needs to sort of regard her as a great sage. She was having some fun as well as perhaps making the kind of comments. I think one always needs to read Mrs. Radcliffe, who I regard as a supremely enjoyable novelist,

alongside Jane Austen spoof in Northanger Abbey. But it's not so far from it. They both finally endorse reason. I think the biggest mistake that's made in the misunderstanding of Gothic is to confuse it with full-blooded medieval nostalgia that you do get in certainly German romanticism and in different forms in English and Scottish romanticism. It's not really that the Gothic writers,

at least the ones we're talking about at the end of the 18th century, Mrs. Ragcliffe and others, are trying to reassert the irrational, against a reason that has become excessive or restrictive, they are in a sense celebrating a release from ages of barbarity and superstition. So that... And there's another thing, actually. The supernatural elements that do the things that do bump in the 19th and always turn out in the end

to have a perfectly natural and rational explanation. That's right. So superstition is conquered at the end of the novel. Exactly. And we return to... We return to a reasonable Protestant world. Could I come in with... with a couple of things there. I mean, one is that although Radcliffe was young, I think she was

immensely ambitious for the novel and for romance specifically. She bulked out her novels with poetic landscape's description, and this is what she was chiefly famous for. She was also a poet, and she included a large number of poems in the novels too, and she was a master of suspense and of effects of the supernatural. So even though they may be explained at the end, they do depend very much on the sensation of superstitious terror. The second thing that I wanted to add was that the supernatural fiction is, in large part, necessarily a product of enlightenment, that while superstition remains a matter of belief, it's not possible, but it's only once it becomes a facet of entertainment of aesthetic sensation. That's actually something that's made possible by the Enlightenment.

Is there a sense in which this was more driven by women than men? There is a feminist strand in Gothic, I think. This is part of its oppositional quality. And I think people have mistaken ideas about the Gothic heroine. She's not always the helpless, fainting creature who needs to be rescued by a hero. And Radcliffe's heroines are actually very strong. And they wield the language of rights, which was very current at the time, obviously, in the context of the French Revolution against the villains.

And I think that's continued right up to the present. I mean, Angela Carter's revisionist takes on, on, um, gender relations through the fantastic, right up to Buffy the Vampire Slayer. The interesting thing is a transition from Gothic, from this spoof novel by this man who built Strawberry Hill in 1764, and then less than 100 years later, about 80 years later, Palace of Westminster, the House of Parliament, are built in the Gothic, and they are the pillars of the establishment, and this is Charles Barry and Augustus Pugian. How is that transition made, Andrew Wilson?

What do you make of it? Charles Barry wasn't particularly interested in the Middle Ages, and then when the competition came up to rebuild the houses of Parliament which were being burnt down in 1834, he submitted a sort of Tudor Gothic theme. And I think part of the reason for that was, in the 1830s and 40s, England was changing from being a basically aristocratic society

to being a basically capitalist society, driven by industry, commerce and money. And I think a great many people wanted to disguise both from themselves, and from the populace at large, quite what was happening. And so they enjoyed the idea of building in the middle of London, this fake medieval building, which looked as there, your high-old aristotraps, who of course were jumped up middle-class people like the rest of us,

who just dropped titles in the 18th century, because they were richer than anybody else, were stretching way back to the old mystic-dhistic-dhistoric times. And then when you had the genius of Pugin added to Barry's, basically Tudor core, Pugin puts into it all these utterly fantastic but highly medieval embellishments. And the House of Lords,

the Chamber of the House of Lords in which you so all justly see at the moment, is one of the most marvellous pieces of architectural fiction that's ever been dreamed up. What I think is wonderful is that Puggin became converted to Catholicism, so Catholicism is smuggled inside the British establishment. And I remember when he had his medieval hall

at the Great Exhibition of 1851, there were tremendous complaints, because they thought it was popery by the back door. He also ended in a madhouse, poor thing, remember. Well, I can't help feeling there's something quite sinister and self-denying about this popularity of the Gothic style. And I'm certain that John Ruskin, who was the chief prophet of medievalism in the period, was appalled by it.

John Ruskin was condemning the social consequences of the Industrial Revolution and presenting the medieval past as an ideal, something to be copied, but in its social structure, not simply in the matter of style. And the use of Gothic to conceal railway stations and factories was anathema to him. Can we talk about John Ruskin and Chris Baldig? He, as has been suggested, I've pointed out by Emma,

proposed the Gothic for all sorts of moral reasons. So he became a moral force in society, as I understand it. I should first say that you've suggested a transition from Gothic fiction in the late 18th century to neo-Gothic architecture and arguments around it in the mid-19th. But I can't see this as a transition. I see this as two distinct movements, which more or less accidentally share the same name. Not entirely unrelated in that they're both, of course, concerned with ideas of the medieval,

largely distorted and simplified ideas of the medieval. But it's the valuations that count. Fran Radcliffe, for example, as a Gothic novelist, the Middle Ages, or actually in her case, the 16th, 17th century, was an area to be exploited that had imaginative possibilities, but in the end her attitude is, well, we should be thankful that we've escaped from all that, that we're not, you know, our daughters are not forced into marriage, we can't be arrested arbitrarily, we are enlightened and modern.

Ruskin, Pugian and the other proponents of neo-Gothic architecture and art, and for that matter the pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, all shared a much stronger, positive, evaluation of medieval culture, either as an age of true faith or as an age of properly organized hierarchical social cohesion in which everybody was

responsible to one another in social terms, in religious terms. And also in terms of the individual's ability to work at a craft, I think that was influence that Ruskin had on educated working people in this country, which was massive, not only in this country, in America and all of it,

but that was a time as he saw it, idealised, no doubt, and sanitised, no doubt, when men and women, but he was taught about men, could actually cut a garagre groil on a cathedral and have done a piece of proper work and not be a cog in a machine in a side of factory. And that mattered a lot to him, both the fact of the individuality of it and the fact that it was a piece of craft. Well, I think there are two things there, aren't there? I mean, Emma's quite right to say that Rastrian was not really associated with what,

in the popular mind we were called the Jossack Revival in Architecture at all. The reason he drove around Europe in that funny old antiquated shades of his fathers, drawing Gothic buildings, ruined cathedral over and over again, Doge's Palace in Venice, was he was quite sure the Industrial Revolution was going to wreck Europe and that he was going round, recording a Europe that was going to be destroyed. He didn't like the idea, as Emma says, of Gothic railway stations or Gothic power stations. He thought they were an anathema and indeed contradiction in terms.

And what you're talking about, his passionate belief in craft, and the idea of the guilds. And in a way, it's the origin of the union, trade union movement. Of course, Rustin's idea of the way that the working man was united with his comrades became very different later on, particularly under the influence of William Morris. And, I mean, Morris is, I think, the key figure here.

But Morris takes on from Ruskin. Who takes on from Rustin's idea... I would dispute, rather, I think Ruskin's idea of work and of the way man... Well, did come from the Middle Ages, from his idea of the Gothic... I was just talking about the specific business of Gothic styles. Yeah.

That's all that meant. The work is central to Gothic as Ruskin conceives it, because he presents really a new notion of what the term Gothic should mean, the nature of Gothic. And for him, it's about the medieval culture as an entire way of life, which respects people's work. Now, his starting point is clearly the extreme division of lay. that he sees in the factory system, a shocking new system, which we're now used to,

but Druskin certainly wasn't his generation. So he thinks up or looks back into the past for a model of something that is saner, more humane than that, by various forms of exaggeration, and he reconstructs how Gothic cathedrals in the true sense, 12th century cathedrals, were built or must have been built. The role played in that construction by the artisan, the crowsynolds, the christians, the christians, the stone mason, and proposes that the working man of the 12th century had greater freedom because he could express himself in his little corner of the cathedral, but in his own way, whereas the factory worker in Manchester or in a cotton mill couldn't possibly do so.

Now, that has a, that argument has a moral charge. It has questionable historical basis. Can we move to this century? Oh, no, last century now, to the 20th century. Gothic style did another leap really Let's just concentrate a little bit on films Do you think that it carried the same idea into the movies The same ideas or did it reinvent itself for the movies?

Well obviously yes film has been the defining medium for Gothic In the 20th century And has established an iconography Which to some extent has become detached from the narratives themselves In a way, what we've had since the expressionist cinema of Germany or the great classic horror films of the 1930s, Frankenstein and Dracula, is a kind of semiotics of Gothic, certain images which have become part of the popular common currency. They're part of the language that we speak about ourselves.

Well, if you simply see a set of fangs or a bolt through the neck, I mean, that instantly conjures certain ideas about society, I suppose. If we include Frankenstein within the Gothic genre, then really it's become one of the fundamental concepts that we think by. The scientist, the arbiter of reason, produces a monster who then returns to haunt and destroy him. And you see that image turning up in so many different contexts. On the one hand, it's become as cozy and familiar as a cup of tea,

and I'm sure that Frankenstein has been used to sell tea at some point. Breakfast cereal, certainly. But on the other hand, it still seems to be capable of provoking a moral panic in the recent case of the Frankenstein foods, evidently. And then another of the tree text, surely, is Dracula, Ramstoker's Dracula, which perhaps isn't a, I mean, I think it's a marvellous book and is one of the texts we haven't discussed, but has its influence, certainly, when translated into the medium of film.

I mean, how many Dracula films are, thousands probably. And that certainly influenced, I would have thought, the gothic style in terms of clothes, fashion, lifestyleity is a horrible word. How far do you think that the presence of the erotic in Gothic has given it its stretch, its long as its reach, Andrew? Well, I very much think the Castle of Petranto and the whole world around Walpole starts off as a highly erotic joke. It's erotic camp, isn't it? It's a chaotic camp.

But, I mean, certainly modern Goths are intending to be, and in my case, it's seething to be sexually attractive. I mean, I think it is fantastic, women who look like Mrs. Munster. And indeed the whole Munster family, I think, are very erotic in their way. But of course, you're smiling, and there's an element of comedy as well. But yes, I think that the Dothic is meant to be erotic. In the sense, we're talking about it, I mean. I don't mean John Ruskin, he was a poor fellow, not very erotic. And probably not so Walter Strott either, really.

But in the sense of the Gothic novel, Dothic fantasy and Dothic film, Yes. Dracula, centrally, and Dracula falls into... The figure of the vampire is the sexiest figure in the tradition, which originates essentially with Byron, the notion that the original vampire is a kind of lady killer, which is a term that actually appeared in Byron's lifetime as a figure of the irresistible seducer,

particularly an aristocrat, which is the most attractive or glamorous kind, who sweeps in in his cape or whatever, and whisks you off to his carcass, where you can't escape. These kinds of games and fantasies are crossover from popular, certainly Hollywood versions of Gothic, into camps booths, into subcultural fashion codes.

What gives them longevity? Because we seem to very often be quite content to have the same images, the same astroats in long cloaks going to the same castles with the same helpless maidens. And you see them walking up and down any high streets in Europe, more or less. It's reassuring. I think that it's a mistake to think

that there's something in Gothic that is absolutely terrifying. It's really there's something in Gothic that is reassuring, and it's reassuring because what we're doing with Gothic, particularly with vampire stories, is in our imaginations killing off a nasty past, the past in which, as we imagine it, some aristocrat could just sweep us away arbitrarily without us being able to answer back,

lock us in a dungeon or something. That's our very simplified modern view of the past and what's bad about it, and we like to rehearse it. And we've learned a formula, the dagger, the stakes through the heart or the jollage, or whatever it might be, to get rid of it. I'm sure Chris is right about that.

And to that extent, of course, there is a political undertone. It's a choosian middle-class fantasy. We also need to remember, though, that Dracula was born at pretty much the same moment as psychoanalysis. I was going to have come to that? Yes. You read myself? I was going to say, did Freud actually give this an extra charge?

Absolutely, yes, I think so. and the familiar plots of Gothic right from the 18th century were easily assimilable into psychoanalytic theory absent mothers, incestuous fathers it's all there and I think that...

The other way around it wasn't say that Freud is the last of the Gothic novelist Yes, indeed and he was... Some of his theories actually came out of readings of Gothic texts, CTA Hoffman's, the Sandman being the obvious example

for the uncanny. But yes, I mean it has given it an added legitimacy, an added charged and in a way sort of rationalised it for the 20th century. Is there anything that the Americans have brought to the Gothic? I mean, it's the American movies we're talking about and on the American television series and so on. Is there an American Gothic that we can discuss in such a term?

There's a very strong American literary tradition of the Gothic from Edgar Allan Poe and Nathaniel Hawthorne, both masters of the short story in the 1830s, through to living novelist Tony Morrison would be an example in the late 20th century before her, again in the American South, which is the hotbed of Gothic writing, William Faulkner, the master of southern Gothic in the 1920s and 30s. That's been a very strong tradition. There are even those historians of American literature who've gone so far as to say the whole tradition of the American novel is Gothic.

I think that's an exaggeration, but it does. It's Henry James rather high and dry, doesn't it? Henry James' master of the ghost story. Of course he had a marvelous story, yes. It's almost as if America was invented. to receive Gothic. That's to say it regards itself as a civilizer, quite rightly in most terms, as a civilization that is escaped

from European ancient forms of tyranny. There are no castles, everything is reasonable, it's a democracy, there is no state religion that you can be dragooned into. Therefore, it's an enlightened civilization, but like other enlightened civilizations, it has to go back and repeat

its moment of separation from the dark past. That's why I think it's so good, was so good at doing Dracula as Frankenstein, eventually the Adams family and the whole popular cycle that comes out of that, it's the dark past that it's grateful to escape from. American, I think, can do it more convincingly than Europe can. Do you think that there's still some element in, let's call it American Gothic, that's reacting against the society?

And if so, what is that? I mean, certainly in youth culture, in the continuing success of the goth music scene, there is a declared opposition to the status quo, I suppose primarily to the Bible Belt aspect of American culture. Whether this is effective or not, I think, is in debate, even within the goth scene. I mean, what's fascinating about it in a way

is this self-monsterizing the way that they dress as the hate figures that they would be set up to be anyway. So they kind of short-circuit the argument in that way. And I think that's what's problematic and perhaps self-defeating about it. It's quite a witty thing to do with one's life, isn't it? If one's going to be horrible and adolescent anyway, just to exaggerate it. Is it, do you think, that they're doing in psychological terms, what Chris says the Drothic novel does anyway,

which is actually something rather reassuring. They are identifying what other people are afraid of, perhaps what they're afraid of in themselves, in order to contain it. and then, of course, when their drothic phase passes, and caricaturing it. And as you said right from the start, yes, there is an element of play. And they can put away their white makeup and their hair dye

when they reach the aged state of 25 or 30. Do you see it as an adolescent stage? It's obviously closely, it's almost perfect, isn't it, for adolescent gloom and melancholy to dress up in black and white your face and look like a corpse or something back from the dead. But it's clear it's a way of resisting, I think in an American context

especially a sort of compulsory cheerfulness that animates the culture at large. That's one of the likes about it, right straight back from the Charles of Oetrento to the young American or European growth. It does resist cheerfulness. It resists that horrible, have a nice day, smiling.

Everything that's positive. Cheer up. Accentuate the positive. Absolutely. I think we would prefer to be a decadent European aristocrat. I'm thinking of the novels of Anne Rice, which are spectacularly success.

which have this cult following, and they are to do really with the glamour associated with deviance, with homosexuality, with deadliness, with being outside of any orthodox frame of behaviour. It's fascinating that that camp element persists. Yes, I mean, camp is important, but I wouldn't want to lose the question of terror as well. From its beginnings as a sort of jokey novelty, a one-off, the production of artificial terror is now a multi-million dollar industry. And one has to ask why, why this demand for terror, why this addiction to it,

and ask what kind of consequences that has. Well, thank you all very much. Thank you, Anne Wilson. Thank you, I'm at Clary, and thank you, Chris Baldick. Next week I'll be looking at the history of mathematics, the Institute and John Barrow. Thank you very much for listening. We hope you've enjoyed this Radio 4 podcast. You can find hundreds of other programmes about history, science and philosophy

at BBC.com.com.uk forward slash radio 4.