Essays on Gothic Literature

When Horace Walpole wrote the first ever Gothic novel in 1764, the world had never seen anything quite like it before. In an age we now call the enlightenment, where knowledge, science and philosophy had made huge leaps forward, this book dared to be openly...

One of the giants of Gothic Literature, Edgar Allan Poe set the standard not only for the genres creepy plot and characters, but also for what it means to be Goth Depicted in portraits dressed in black, with haunted, sunken eyes, Poe’s bad boy behavior,...

In a rather prophetic statement about a doomed family residing in an ancestral home, where the curse of the father becomes the curse of the children, Hawthorne writes in The House of the Seven Gables, “Ambition is a talisman more powerful than witchcraft” (209). For...

Sleep is a physically and mentally vulnerable state; the body is unconscious, unsuspecting, and the mind is visited frequently by an array of distorted images called dreams. Only devilish and cruel predators hunt sleeping prey, when struggle is least viable and victory is guaranteed. The...

In an essay concerning the components of the Romantic novel, James P. Carson frames the difference between Gothic and Romantic attitudes as a “disagreement over values inherent in attempts to represent people” (Matthews). He succinctly describes the difference as one of intent: the Romantic novel...

Gothic architecture thrived during the high and late medieval period. The upper echelons of the feudal system were so impressed by the looming cathedrals that they had their castles built in the same Gothic style. These castles are striking yet, at the same time, sinister:...

The idea that you could transform into something evil scares us all, therefore gothic literature uses this as a common tactic to induce greater fear. In “House Taken Over” by Julio Cortazar we can see the transformation of fear in the siblings daily lives, which...

The Monk, published in 1796 by Matthew Lewis, holds the distinction of one of the most popular and most controversial Gothic novels of all times. Set in the backdrop of the Protestant Reformation in Spain, the novel addresses and challenges many sensitive, tabooed societal norms,...

Matthew Lewis’s The Monk takes its era’s heightened anti-Catholicism to heart, and uses it to critique social norms. Lewis tackles the problem of the fetishization of purity that the Catholic Church, and society outside the Church hold so highly. Lewis presents the idea that despite...

“Emily gazed with melancholy awe upon the castle, which she understood to be Montoni’s; for, though it was now lighted up by the setting sun, the gothic greatness of its features, and its mouldering walls of dark grey stone, rendered it a gloomy and sublime...

It is important for those with problems to seek refuge in a place where they can better sort out their difficulties and find solutions to their predicaments. Different people have different methods of coping with their problems: some attempt to distract themselves, others simply find...

Nathaniel Hawthorne uses symbols and characters to portray the struggle between aristocratic and democratic ideas in his novel, The House of the Seven Gables. The democratic ideas which develop throughout the novel prevail against the aristocratic greed, injustice, and pride. Hawthorne begins his novel with...

By the 19th-century, according to Hawthorne and Melville, a man’s home was no longer his castle, but an effete parlor-room, a locus of stripped and castrated masculinity that hampered the development of classically intellectual and original literature in favor of the mawkish and uniform. While...

It has almost become an everyday slogan, in light of present events, that behind everything that seems so perfect there is some horrible mistake, or some terrible sin waiting to come back and rear its ugly head. Nathaniel Hawthorne could not have given any better...

Ostensibly a tale of the effects of sin and guilt as manifested through successive generations of a New England family, Hawthorne’s The House of the Seven Gables is a richly detailed novel with multiple levels of meaning and ambiguities that have prompted a wide array...

In an attempt to write a more cheerful novel then his brooding Scarlet Letter during a time when optimism was the one quality shared by all, Hawthorne writes, what critics call today, a contrived ending for his House of Seven Gables. When all seems its...

In Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Hound of the Baskervilles (HOB), Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson are immersed in a setting that appears to transcend the known limits of the physical world. A demoniacal hound roaming the moors of Devonshire is rumored to have been...

Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto was the first gothic novel, and thus was the originator of many of the distinctive features that have pertained throughout the history of the genre. Early gothic was characterized by the rejection of enlightenment thinking in favor of the intense...

The appearance of the Gothic in architecture of the Middle Ages was the start point and muse of Gothic Literary. The lack of simplicity, symmetry, regularity and nonconformation to nature inspired the features of Gothic Literature: horror/ terror, dark environment, paranormal, evil creatures, supernatural entities...