Content area
Full Text
The low throb of a bass guitar pounded from giant speakers from somewhere inside: the Rolling Stones' Sympathy for the Devil. Mick Jagger's ragged voice growled out the song's familiar refrain as Derek turned off the street onto the long driveway that looped around in front of the house. Beyond the row of parked cars, a half dozen motorcycles were lined up on the grass. A couple of women in long dresses sat on the damp front lawn, sharing a pipe.
The house itself was an architectural monstrosity, more Gothic manse than the Victorian manor it pretended to be. Whoever designed the thing was either deranged or had an odd sense of humor. Its face was all peaked windows and filigree, but the round towers that rose above its overlapping gabled roofs looked like someone's dream of a medieval castle, badly drawn. (Lake 1994, 81)
For the past twenty-five years, I have been teaching graduate and undergraduate seminars on Gothic fiction.These courses are "dedicated" to both General Education students looking for a "fun class," if not a cheap chill, and hard-core English majors seeking various levels of enlightenment. I always find that the introduction either makes or breaks the class, either stresses or blesses the teacher. Not coincidentally, I also discover that the introduction is the most difficult portion of the course to design, especially determining the right blend of depth and breadth, of complex theoretical and pop cultural material which aligns itself so easily with the Gothic and with which students so closely identify. The following account provides the background and pedagogical strategies for introducing Gothic fiction which have proven most successful in my classes.
Opening the door to this introduction to my introduction to Gothicism, I feel already snared in some Gothic figure-within-a-figure like the narrative mousetrap "Mad Trist" in "The Fall of the House of Usher." As fictional introductions to the "Gothic manse" go, however, Paul Lake's narrative above appears fairly lightweight, especially compared to the heavily determined, more classic descriptions of structures like Otranto, Udolpho, or Usher. Still, introducing Gothic artistry by way of such Gothic architecture can prove an immensely successful classroom strategy. In fact, it fulfills my own course goals by clarifying Gothic narrative and dramatic structures, image...