The Development of the Gothic Heroine

Gothic literature can be defined as writing that employs dark and picturesque scenery, startling and melodramatic narrative devices, and an overall atmosphere of exoticism, mystery, and dread.

Gothic can be defined as “literature dealing with the strange, mysterious, and supernatural designed to invoke suspense and terror in the reader.” (Pickering, 2004, p. 1425) Gothic literature generally presents the same themes and motifs: love lost, hidden secrets, love and death hand in hand, beauty, youth, grotesque characters, macabre eroticism, etc. Gothic literature also explores taboo subjects such as murder, suicide and incest. “A Rose for Emily”, by William Faulkner, is representative of the Southern Gothic stories since the themes of love lost, death, and murder are present in it. There are many elements that hint at the Gothic nature of the story: Emily’s description, her house, the poison she bought, and finally the ending.

Gothic literature has been criticized as being a dreary, dark, and death-involving subset of Romanticism (a literary movement accentuating human individuality, imagination, and subjectivity). In addition, gothic lit incorporates several themes- not all about deathly acts - but includes some emotional and surprising themes such as dreams, nightmares, or hallucinations, and grotesque or bizarre occurrences. Two short stories, both written by Edgar Allan Poe, entitled “The Raven,” and “The Black Cat,” as well as the novel The Night Circus, by Erin Morgenstern, all encompass these gothic elements, found throughout each story.

Gothic literature uses wide ranging themes and gothic elements to convey its story. Gothic literature short stories can range from romance to horror to supernatural occurrences. Horacio Quiroga’s “The Feather Pillow,” Richard Matheson’s “Prey,” and Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Black Cat” all incorporate the following gothic elements: violence, revenge, hallucinations, nightmares, and psychological issues.

Hence, Austen’s protagonist Catherine Morland, is not the typical gothic heroine, she is an ordinary, gullible, and naïve young girl. However, stereotypically, to the gothic novels she reads, Catherine becomes absorbed with the metonymical language, and hackneyed fantasised events portrayed in this gothic fiction. Thus, Catherine’s ingenuousness disposition makes it difficult for her to differentiate between the fictitious gothic world, and real life-reality. Ultimately, she misunderstands situations, confuses friendships, and fails to distinguish between manipulative and genuine

However, despite changes, the literary world remained predominantly male, and women writers not encouraged, or taken seriously. Consequently, to counteract this Emily Bronte published her novel Wuthering Heights, under the male pseudonym of Ellis Bell. Wuthering Heights is the story of domesticity, obsession, and elemental divided passion between the intertwined homes of the Earnshaw’s residing at the rural farmhouse Wuthering Heights, and the Linton family of the more genteel Thrushcross Grange. This essay will discuss how the language and narrative voices established a structural pattern of the novel, and how these differing voices had a dramatic effect on the interpretation of the overall story.

Dark, gloomy castles, noble peasants and virginal maidens are all staples of typical gothic literature. Without Horace Walpole’s, The Castle of Otranto, gothic literature would not be what it is today. While there is a plethora of recurring elements in gothic literature, the damsel in distress has been a founding staple of the genre and has persisted through time.

The meaning of the term gothic literature has changed over the years. While many people today associate gothic with horror, the word actually refers to stories that fuse together elements of both horror and romanticism. It has been stated that "gothic writers have always held the colonial fringes to be particularly potent sources of horror for the English imagination, particularly those areas deemed part of the Celtic world" (Killeen). Gothic literature is usually associated with a dark, gloomy setting, such as a haunted house or castle. Often, there is a supernatural being such as a ghost, vampire, or zombie along with a curse or prophecy tied to the story's setting. Earlier depictions of gothic literature also tended to weave a romantic element between the male lead character and a damsel in distress into the story. Modern gothic literature puts a spin on these traditional ideas of storytelling. "The Gothic, in other words, mutates across historical, national, and generic boundaries as it reworks images drawn from different ages and places" (Smith).

The Gothic literature movement began in the late 19th century and was a derivative of the Romantic Movement. Writers of the Gothic Genre were focused on drawing on the emotions of the reader and creating an atmosphere of suspense, mystery, terror and dread. The writers also emphasized the supernatural, and how horror can be present in many everyday situations. Gothic texts also place emphasis on emotions such as agitation, hysteria, mystery, venerability, suspense and panic. Many Gothic texts are based in places that are decaying, deserted, abandoned, isolated or that have a have a history of death, war and family feuds. The short story The Adventure of the Speckled

Gothic literature includes elements of style that is usually portrayed in tales and deals with horror, despair, the grotesque, and mysteries. In the novel Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte, there are many elements of gothic literature that is found throughout the book. The term gothic is very broad in literature, and gothic can mean many different things from characteristics of people, feelings and reactions of a specific setting, mood, actions that happen being people, and so much more. All of this thrived in the 19th century. Gothic is categorized by an emphasis on the dark, gloomy, and mysterious. Ideas such as magic, hidden passages, wind, ghosts, and other supernatural elements, love, etc were all elements in the Gothic movement during the 19th century. Specifically, the descriptions of the settings, both outside and inside, in the novel, the actions of the main protagonists in the novel, and the love between Catherine and Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights all add on to this idea of a gothic literature or tradition.

Women in the 18th and 19th century were expected to follow the orders of the males in their lives. They were forced into arranged marriages to connect families in a pursuit for social power and they were expected to abide by anything the males in their lives asked of them. Free will was nonexistent. Much gothic literature effectively highlights the women’s expected role of the time. However, another aspect that seems to surface in gothic literature is whenever there is a woman who is not following the social norms, they seem to be the driving conflict behind the plotline and ultimately lead to any present happy ending.

      Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved is a slave narrative, but it encompasses much more than slavery.  Unlike many slave narratives that focus on the male perception of slavery, Morrison's novel portrays slavery from a feminine point of view.  The main characters are Sethe, her daughter, Denver, and the mysterious Beloved.  In the beginning of the novel, Sethe and her daughter live alone in 124, a house that is haunted by the ghost of Sethe's first daughter. Sethe's two older boys, "Howard and Buglar, had run away by the time they were thirteen years old. Soon after the sons have fled, Baby Suggs, Denver's grandmother, dies.  The novel centers on Sethe's past, in particular, the death of her

The term gothic serves as the ideal backdrop for a literary era of suspense, mystery, and terror. A haunted mansion bursting with secrets, a naïve helpless heroine, and the male hero that saves the day are all quintessentially gothic. When Ellen Moers first coined the term “Female Gothic” in her 1976 book, Literary Women, she defined it as “the work that women writers have done in the literary mode that, since the eighteenth century have been termed Gothic” (Moers). Her argument that Female Gothic literature is a code for women’s fear of domestic entrapment, especially within their own bodies as was mainly experienced in childbirth and motherhood, was quite influential. Anne Williams, in her book The Art of Darkness: A Poetics of Gothic, argues that Female Gothic can be further dissected to include its intention to criticize the patriarchy while educating and socializing its female readers with an affirmation of absolute independence and strength. The Female Gothic is often pursued and haunted by a villainous patriarchal figure, but finds salvation on her own accord and more importantly, within herself. Another element of Female gothic is madness and monstrosity as an explanation for why the female would deviate from the conventional norm.

In Emily Brontё’s Wuthering Heights gothic elements such as recurring deaths, and the ruins of Wuthering Heights work together to further the plot and support the theme, nature vs. nurture.

The Gothic Features of Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte A Gothic novel is a type of literature, which became very popular in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In this time, society was governed by strict moral codes. The "Gothics" would escape into a world of dark, supernatural and wild passions. The word 'Gothic' meant barbarous and wild and many writers liked to involve these elements in their novels.