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The Gothic Imaginary and Literary Modernism
The Gothic imaginary in its diverse literary embodiments has come to be understood as a discourse that brings to the fore the dark side of modernity (Botting 2). As narrative, it is the black sheep of the AngloAmerican novel, which has generally been taken to concern marriage and the contexts that make marriage possible.1 Although Gothic narratives regularly focus on marriage or on social and sexual relations between the sexes, often those relations are threatened or abrogated, as in Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto: A Gothic Story (1765) and Mary Shelley's Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (1818; revised 1831). Gothic sexuality may also take a bizarre form, as in Bram Stoker's Dracula ( 1 897), a form that raises anthropological issues in arresting ways. Some of those issues were already present less insistently in the earliest Gothic narratives, because the threat to marriage, family, and home amounts to a threat to the stability and the future of culture. That dark threat comes from inside.
The historical origins of Gothic writing in the eighteenth century are simultaneously political and aesthetic. Rising along with the English novel during the same decades that are the prelude to Romanticism, the Gothic in its narrative form engages issues of beauty, the character of the sublime and the grotesque, the political dynamics of British culture (especially with regard to the kind of social change that comes to be represented by the French Revolution), the quality of being English (including the holding of anti-Catholic religious attitudes), the structure of the economy (especially concerning property in a market economy and gift-exchange), and the place of women in hierarchies of power. Stylistically, the Gothic has always been excessive in its responses to conventions that foster the order and clarity of realistic representations, conventions that embody a cultural insistence on containment. The essentially anti-realistic character of Gothic writing from the beginning creates in advance a compatibility with modernist writing. That compatibility begins to take a visible, merged form in the 1890s in Britain. In the development of the Gothic after the French Revolution, the characteristics and issues apparent in Gothic writing of the eighteenth century carry forward into the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, but they are significantly transformed,...