Sample Student Research Project 2018: Journal
LITR
4328 American Renaissance / Model Assignments
Sample Student Research Project 2018:
Journal
Brandon Burrow
2 Dec. 2018
The Haunting Importance of the
Evolution of the Gothic
Beginnings
While perusing the model assignments page, I ran across a
2016 research journal submission by Austin Green that focused on discovering
what happened to the Gothic genre since the time that Edgar Allan Poe wrote and
popularized it in America. I had already been noticing that I myself from memory
could only trace the Gothic until the Southern Gothic movement, which included
authors such as William Faulkner and Flannery O’ Connor, great writers to be
sure, but that was still a long time ago. The elements of the Gothic have not
just disappeared, as I almost immediately thought of one of my favorite
directors, Guillermo Del Toro, and his movie Crimson Peak. It is a film that
feels very familiar thematically and aesthetically to our readings of Poe, but
it seems that in modern times the Gothic genre has been swallowed by the larger
genre of Horror. What is the difference? What was the evolution like? Like
Austin, I was immediately sucked in by the idea of tracing the evolution of the
Gothic and finding out why its rich darkness seems to only be associated with
the past, and not the contemporary works that seem obviously inspired by it.
At the beginning of my journey I have a few leads. I know
that H.P. Lovecraft, an author whose work is categorized as supernatural or
cosmic horror rather than Gothic, admired Poe deeply and credited him with
inspiring his own writing. I also know that Poe was considered almost European
from class discussion with another professor, and that Oscar Wilde’s
Picture of Dorian Gray is considered
heavily influenced by the writings of Poe. To start this journal, I think I will
define the Gothic and the movements that it had while it still carried the
Gothic moniker. Then I will seek out works that are not labeled as such and find
the traces of the Gothic within them to see what it is that truly makes
something Gothic and if it still survives today, just rebranded.
Gothic Elements Recap
I started by reviewing our course site as well as by
cross referencing it with another website like it to refresh myself on the
elements of the Gothic. Haunted settings, including lonely mansions, dilapidated
castles, spooky woods, and decaying isolated ruins are common. Grotesque and
vivid morbid language and description as well as contrast between light and
dark, life and death are also prevalent motifs. Mazes and labyrinths can also be
prominent fixtures, mostly in the subgenre of psychological Gothic, also known
as European Gothic – this is something I should be on the lookout for when I
read The
Picture of Dorian Gray – where the
twisting maze is often seen as corresponding to the haunted mind of a character.
Correspondence and twinning are frequent themes, and ones that we have already
encountered this semester, particularly in the Poe stories we read for class
“William Wilson” and “The Fall of the House of Usher.” On the website I found
run by professor Robert Harris, he mentions ancient prophecies, omens, portents,
visions, and “supernatural or otherwise inexplicable events” as being essential
to the Gothic canon (2); this sounds like the Lovecraft tie-in that I have been
looking for. Harris also mentions women endangered and in distress, another
common Poe theme where a beautiful young woman just cannot survive a story. I
think I now have a pretty clear idea of what I’m looking for, but I still find
myself with the question of what makes these things work so well? I will have to
make a note to research a few sources that deconstruct the importance of the
Gothic and why it resonates with readers.
1.
http://coursesite.uhcl.edu/HSH/Whitec/terms/G/gothic.htm
2.
https://www.virtualsalt.com/gothic.htm
History of the Gothic
While not the most scholarly source, Wikipedia is at
times a necessary evil and most likely my best bet for a quick history of the
Gothic and an overview of Gothic sub-genres. The genesis of the Gothic is
popularly credited to the 1764 novel The
Castle of Otranto by English author Horace Walpole who invented his style in
response to finding the medieval romances that preceded him too goofy and the
contemporary novels of his time too realistic and dull (1).
Building on Walpole’s achievements, other European
authors such as Clara Reeve and Ann Radcliffe placed their own spin on the
genre. Reeve expanded the “Gothic narrative framework” to continue expanding the
“imaginative domain as to include the supernatural without losing the realism
that marks the novel that Walpole pioneered” (1). She also focused on making her
fiction more “believable and coherent” spurning what she considered to be
over-the-top comic liberties Walpole had taken in
The Castle of Otranto (1).
Supernatural events that were firmly within the realm of the probable was
Reeve’s contribution to the genre. Ann Radcliffe took this idea farther when she
developed the technique of explaining the supernatural in “which every seemingly
supernatural intrusion is eventually traced back to natural causes” (1). Her
work was popular in her time and she is credited with introducing the “brooding
figure of the Gothic villain” in her 1790 novel,
A Sicilian Romance, an archetypal
figure that would evolve and come to be known as the “Byronic hero” that
populated many later popular works of Gothic fiction (1). Best known for
The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), Ann
Radcliffe was a best-selling author, but her novels were “looked down upon by
many well-educated people as sensationalist nonsense” at the time of her
writing, much like the pulp magazines that contained the weird and supernatural
tales after the era of American Romanticism (1). Radcliffe is credited with
inspiring “Gothic feminism,” and she also penned one of the first essays that
attempted to define the “aesthetic for the genre” in her article “On the
Supernatural in Poetry” which examined the “correlation between horror and
terror in Gothic fiction” (1). Radcliffe liked to combine “experiences of terror
and wonder with visual description” in a way that reminded me of our study of
the sublime in class (1).
Around the same time as these initial forays into the
burgeoning Gothic genre in England, “Romantic literary movements developed in
continental Europe,” mainly in Germany and Russia, that were often “more
horrific and violent than” their English counterparts (1). Matthew Lewis’s
The Monk (1796) is considered to be
the first “continental novel to follow the conventions of the Gothic novel” (1).
Lewis’s novel depicted religious figures such as monks, inquisitors, and nuns in
a way that “appalled some readers” who did not appreciate his “scurrilous view
of the Catholic Church (1). I was immediately reminded of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s
writing and how intertwined it is with New England Salem area Puritan religion.
The Monk inspired Radcliffe’s last
novel The Italian (1797), as well as
well-known German author, E. T. A. Hoffman’s,
The Devil’s Elixir’s (1815). The
novel “explores the motive of doppelganger,” a “term coined by another German
author,” Jean Paul, in his novel
Siebenkas (1). I was astonished at how recently the idea of a doppelganger
became an established trope in literature. Doppelgangers and twinning already
seem like a well-worn convention by the time of Poe.
English Romanticism is the next stop on the Gothic
timeline. Works such as Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1798),
Percy Bysse Shelley’s Zastrozzi
(1810), Mary Shelley’s
Frankenstein (1818), as well as the
writings of authors such as John Keats, Lady Caroline Lamb and Lord Byron, all
contributed to the Gothic genre during the English Romantic period. Lady
Caroline Lamb and Lord Byron cemented the Byronic hero archetype, described by
Lamb as an individual who was “mad, bad and dangerous to know” (1). Mary
Shelley’s Frankenstein is considered
the precursor to the science fiction genre and the novel was an early example of
scientific progress vs morals (1).
By the arrival of the Victorian Era, Gothic was no longer
the dominating genre and had been relegated to cheap pulp magazines called penny
dreadfuls. Serials such as Faust
(1846) and Varney the Vampire (1847)
moved the genre towards working class readership (1). This is of course the time
of American Romanticism and Edgar Allan Poe who largely wrote in a Psychological
Gothic style. Emily Bronte’s Wuthering
Heights (1847), Charlotte Bronte’s
Jane Eyre (1847), Louisa May Alcott’s
A Long Fatal Love Chase (written in 1866, but not published until 1995) are
all examples of a subgenre known as the Female Gothic, which explored “woman’s
entrapment within domestic space and subjection to patriarchal authority and the
transgressive and dangerous attempts to subvert and escape such restriction”
(1). The vampire tale grew immensely popular in the likes of Sheridan Le Fanu’s
Carmilla (1871-1872) and Bram
Stoker’s Dracula (1897) (1).
According to literary critic Terry Eagleton, these Gothic stories, “featuring
castles set in a barren landscape, with a cast of remote aristocrats dominating
an atavistic peasantry, represent in allegorical from the political plight of
colonial Ireland subjected to the Protestant Ascendancy (1). I keep seeing the
Gothic genre being mentioned as thought of as being pulp, non-literary, or
sensationalist by critics and established readers of the time, however, it seems
that more effort is being taken to deconstruct the genre by the Victorian era.
The Gothic novel is on one hand belittled by critics, but
on the other, its importance is being recognized by the Victorians who held a
“fascination” for its themes due to their “morbid obsession with mourning
rituals, mementos, and mortality in general” (1). During the 1880’s the Gothic
form saw a “revival” as a “powerful literary form allied to fin de siècle,”
which fictionalized contemporary fears like ethical degeneration and questioned
the social structures of the time. (1). Novels such as Robert Louis Stevenson’s
Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
(1886), Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of
Dorian Gray (1891), and Henry James’
The Turn of the Screw (1898) are all works that are thought to respond to
this phenomena (1). The Gothic tale seems to already be evolving from a cheap
thrill to a haunting tale of morality, psychology and cultural criticism. I am
happy to see Oscar Wilde’s The
Picture of Dorian Gray on the list of
notable works, and I am certainly going to read it and try to determine for
myself how it is responding to the fin de siècle.
In America, the Gothic was represented as well during the
time of the English Victorian writers. Washington Irving, Edgar Allen Poe,
Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman were all writing during the
same time period that vampires were invading London. While decaying European
castles were not uncommon in Poe’s work, the American Gothic more prominently
featured more natural settings such as caves or haunted woods and forests such
as in Washington Irving’s “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.” (2) Instead of the
man-made imagery of a crumbling bloodline, “early [American] settlers were
overcome by fear linked to the unexplored territory which surrounded, and in
some cases, engulfed them” (2). While the Gothic genre has a certain dark
framework that artists work within, the shape that the phantoms and horrifying
elements in the stories seems to be specifically shaped by the culture and
region that is producing the literature.
After the turn of the 19th Century, this
division in Gothic literature just seems to continue breaking down into smaller
subgenres. Instead of English, American, and Continental European traditions,
many subgenres such as Pulp, New Gothic Romance, Southern Gothic, and more
recently, Southern Ontario Gothic and Modern Horror emerge on the scene (1).
While I recognize many names from the lists of authors in these different
styles, the sections on Wikipedia have considerably thinned out in the
information department on these sub-genres. However, one entry under the “Pulp”
heading catches my eye: H.P. Lovecraft wrote an essay entitled “Supernatural
Horror in Literature” in 1936 (1). The Wiki also mention that the “Gothic genre
per se gave way to modern horror fiction, regarded by some literary critics as a
branch of the Gothic although others use the term to cover the entire genre”
(1). I think my short survey of the history behind the Gothic has come to an
end, but I have a lead in Lovecraft’s essay. I don’t want to endlessly grind
down into the subdivisions, but rather find the unifying thread and what is
essential to the Gothic that makes people still recognize it and appreciate the
form today, so I’m moving on.
1.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gothic_fiction#Precursors
2.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Gothic_Fiction
Essays on the Nature of the Gothic
I found Lovecraft’s essay as well as an essay by
Guillermo Del Toro written in an introduction to an anthology of supernatural
tales by American writers that I think will be invaluable to my knowledge of
what makes the Gothic tick. Summaries of what I took from both follows.
Sometimes, Wikipedia gets it right. Whoever edited the
pages I read on the Gothic was definitely familiar with H.P. Lovecraft’s
“Supernatural Horror in Literature”. In his essay, Lovecraft introduces the
weird tale as a “literary form” (1). To Lovecraft, the “oldest and strongest
emotion of mankind is fear,” particularly fear of the unknown, and he credits
the “weird tale” for having survived through all the criticism and opposition it
has faced because it is based “on a profound and elementary principle, whose
appeal, if not always universal, must necessarily be poignant and permanent to
minds of the requisite sensitiveness” (1). Horror literature is imaginative. It
requires an eye for the underlying currents in our society and a probing into
our psyche. In Lovecraft’s opinion, “relatively few are free enough from the
spell of the daily routine to respond the rappings from outside” and thus the
Gothic continues to be criticized by those who do not seek to understand its
deeper meaning (1).
Lovecraft writes about how in man’s
early days the unknown was all around him. A sense of awe was contained within
every natural phenomenon that we have explained away with time, experience, and
science. The Gothic is always on the fringe, it is seeking to explain that which
we have not yet fully been able to come to terms with. Lovecraft argues that
“much of the choicest weird work is unconscious,” as it is the “discharge” of
“certain phantasmal shapes” from the mind of authors that would “otherwise haunt
them” (1-2). Weird tales aren’t just bloody and grotesque; there is a deeper
element to the tale that sets it apart from being simply body horror. There must
be a “suspension or defeat of those fixed laws of Nature” that guide and protect
us, the veil has to be pulled back so that we can confront something that is not
mundane and routine (2).
After his introduction, Lovecraft’s
paper is largely focused on the history of the Gothic, and I saw many familiar
names and novels that I wrote about in my previous entry. I wish I had known
about this first, because he not only hits many of the same authors but leaves
concise and informative reviews of their most influential work. Some differences
of note are his identification of “cosmic horror” in the Scandinavian Eddas and
Sagas, and in medieval literature such as Thomas Malory’s
Morte d’Arthur (3). Lovecraft is not
satisfied with what is just considered the beginnings of Gothic novel, he is
looking for the ingredients that went into the recipe, he is a man after my own
heart. While he does give credit to Walpole for
The Castle of Otranto, he says that
“the line of actual artists” begins with Edgar Allan Poe (4). To Lovecraft, Poe
is the quintessential weird writer, in his words, “Poe did that which no one
else ever did or could have done; and to him we owe the modern horror-story in
its final and perfected state” (12). Poe did not just focus on scaring the
reader, instead he “studied the human mind rather than the usages of Gothic
fiction” and wrote in such a way that “his elevation of disease, perversity, and
decay to the level of artistically expressible themes was likewise infinitely
far-reaching in effect,” and Lovecraft credits him with inventing the short
story as we know it today (13). I had known that Lovecraft was influenced by
Poe, but I did not realize the depths of his admiration for the man. A final
take away I had from this essay was a fantastic passage in which he talks about
what American writers specifically drew from:
The vast and gloomy virgin forests in whose perpetual
twilight all terrors might well lurk; the hordes of coppery Indians whose
strange, saturnine visages and violent customs hinted strongly at traces of
infernal origin; the free rein given under the influence of Puritan theocracy to
all manner of notions respecting man’s relation to the stern and vengeful God of
the Calvinists, and to the sulphureous Adversary of that God, about whom so much
was thundered in the pulpits each Sunday; and the morbid introspection developed
by an isolated backwoods life devoid of normal amusements and of the
recreational mood, harassed by commands for theological self-examination, keyed
to unnatural emotional repression, and forming above all a mere grim struggle
for survival—all these things conspired to produce an environment in which the
black whisperings of sinister grandams were heard far beyond the chimney corner,
and in which tales of witchcraft and unbelievable secret monstrosities lingered
long after the dread days of the Salem nightmare. (15)
While his description of Native Americans is racist, a
well-known and unfortunate reality present in many of Lovecraft’s writings, he
expanded upon what Wikipedia had given me in my earlier search. America was a
new land; its secrets were still being discovered and the unknown is what people
truly feared. No one knew what lay just beyond the edge of their perception, and
that is where I think the Gothic is meant to come in. It meets you at the edge
and guides you over the cliff before safely returning you in a sweat to your
comfy seat in an air-conditioned room.
http://www.hplovecraft.com/writings/texts/essays/shil.aspx
Essay Two
In Guillermo Del Toro’s essay, “Haunted Castles, Dark
Mirrors” located in the frontmatter of Penguin Horror’s
American Supernatural Tales, Del Toro
seeks to shine a light into the darkness that calls to us and see what manner of
beast lurks there. Del Toro notes, “to learn what we fear is to learn who we
are. Horror defines our boundaries and illuminates our souls” (xiii).
When we forget the rules of the universe and allow ourselves to be drawn
into the supernatural, that is when we can see the fantastic figures, the angel
and the devil, good and evil. By relinquishing some portion of sanity, abstract
thought and consideration of ideals that seem absurd in a modern world are
allowed a chance to communicate with us. In many horror tales “we can parade the
most reprehensible aspects of our being: cannibalism, incest, parricide,” which
“allows us to discuss our anxieties and even to contemplate the experience of
death in absolute safety” (xiv). Horror’s role can be that of a release valve, a
chance to say, “look we are not like that!” but then again… that was fascinating
to think about for a moment. Like ultra-violent video games of the present day,
most sane people do not want to reenact the things they do on their screen in
real life, but there is some thrill to experiencing the unsavory in simulation.
Del Toro argues that the Gothic tale “surged as a
reaction against the suffocating dogmas of the Enlightenment” (xv). When the Age
of Reason finally went to sleep, imagination was unchained and that freedom
“produced monsters” (xv). According to Del Toro, “horror can serve as a
liberating or repressive social tool, and it is always an accurate reflection of
the social climate of its time and the place where it gets birthed” (xv). This
continues the theme that has been coalescing during my research that the Gothic
is simply the emanation of an individual’s or a society’s fears and taboos come
to life.
Del Toro notes that towards the end of the Victorian
Gothic Era, science, including social sciences like psychology, began to creep
into dark literature. This reminded me of Ann Radcliffe’s insistence that the
supernatural works best when grounded in some reality. Like Lovecraft, Del Toro
considers Poe’s work a “fundamental stepping-stone between the legacy of Gothic
horror and the threshold of its modern incantations” (xix). The haunted castle
is redefined by Poe to be a labyrinth of the mind (xix). As the natural world is
dominated by man, the Gothic seems to shift more towards the exploration of the
unknown realm of our own inner selves. The terms and constructs might stay the
same, but what they represent has changed with the ages, “the haunted castle is
now officially our mind and the ghost is desire” (xxiii).
I was quite pleased with what I learned from these
essays. Horror as a genre is constantly evolving based on the needs of the
society that produces it. Poe is consistently mentioned as being integral to the
entire genre. While I’m running out of pages, I think my final entries in this
journal will to start tracking the Gothic after Poe by reading Oscar Wilde’s
The Picture of Dorian Gray and
Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill
House and trying to see what they were responding to, and how they relate to
the heralded master of the Gothic, Edgar Allan Poe.
1.
Del Toro,
Guillermo and Joshi, S. T., editor. “Haunted Castles, Dark Mirrors.” American
Supernatural Tales.
Penguin Books Ltd, 2013.
The Picture of
Dorian Gray
This novel is dripping with Gothic and Romantic
sensibilities. Dorian’s youthful innocence is corrupted by Lord Henry’s
tantalizing hedonistic lifestyle and provocative witticisms, which cause a
paradigm shift towards darkness in the way Dorian views himself and the world.
His development towards morally bereft hedonistic behavior alters his perception
of Basil Howard’s portrait of himself and reflects his loss of innocence as he
turns to the life of a self-serving and shallow aesthete. Dorian sells his soul
to a supernatural power to retain his youth and beauty, while the painting of
himself becomes a “misshapen shadow that ha[s] to bear the burden that should
have been his own,” as it ages in his place as a twin of himself and as
correspondent imagery of the evil that lurks within Dorian’s mind (Wilde 144).
As the beauty of the painting is eaten away by Dorian’s sins like “worms” that
feed on a “corpse,” Dorian becomes increasingly haunted by his actions and
lapses into a paranoia reminiscent of Poe’s narrator in his short story “William
Wilson” (122). As William Wilson exposes the sins of the narrator in Poe’s tale,
the painting becomes hateful to Dorian because it exposes his own shortcomings.
The stories end in similar fashion, with the protagonists attacking the despised
images of themselves, only to be slain by their own hand at the moment they
destroy their doppelganger. It is unclear if there is truly a supernatural force
behind these phantoms that haunt the main characters, or if their journey was a
purely psychological one and their malice towards their mimics was only
self-hatred projected from within.
The Picture of Dorian
Gray is often read as a work heavily influenced by the
fin de siècle, a term that refers to works across the artistic spectrum
representing a “whole set of artistic, moral, and social concerns” in response
to “the old order ending and new, radical departures” surfacing with the turn of
the century (2). Joyce Carol Oates notes that critics are often quick to dismiss
it as just this, and thus only pay attention to “the daylight side of Wilde’s
aesthetics and make no allusion [in their work] to the cautionary and even
elegiac tone of much of” the novel (Oates 419).
Oates postulates that, “Wilde’s great theme is the Fall . . . but this
falling from grace is available only to those who have attained a certain degree
of economic and spiritual freedom. Restlessness, ennui, the inability to apply
one’s strength to anything—these are not merely symptoms of Dorian’s perverse
nature but symptoms of a highly advanced and sophisticated civilization itself”
(425-426). Through this lens, The Picture
of Dorian Gray becomes a “foul parody, some infamous, ignoble satire” of
English society (Wilde 160). The Gothic is being used by Wilde to communicate an
underlying fear of the degradation of his society, which the noble and socially
beloved Dorian is meant to signify. The psychological descent of Dorian into
madness brought on by his behavior is simply a riveting trip “through the
chambers of the brain “rife with “phantoms more terrible than reality itself,”
and flush with the “vivid life that lurks in all grotesques… that lends to
Gothic art its enduring vitality” (134).
1.
Wilde, Oscar.
The Picture of Dorian Gray. Barnes &
Nobles Classics, 2003.
2.
Fin de siècle -
http://www.oxfordbibliographies.com/view/document/obo-9780199799558/obo-9780199799558-0030.xml
3.
Oates, Joyce Carol.
“‘The Picture of Dorian Gray’: Wilde's Parable of the Fall.” Critical Inquiry,
vol. 7, no. 2, 1980, pp. 419–428. JSTOR, JSTOR,
www.jstor.org/stable/1343135.
The Haunting of
Hill House
Shirley Jackson’s
The Haunting of Hill House follows Eleanor Vance as she becomes increasingly
more unhinged and eventually commits suicide so that she can forever remain
bound to the “not sane” Hill House (3). Eleanor is a lonely and awkward woman,
who is prone to flights of fancy and “c[an] not remember ever being truly happy
in her adult life” (6). This makes her a prime target for the “insistent
hospitality” offered by Hill House (63). The House possesses a strange geometry
where “every angle is slightly wrong” that befuddles the viewer and is
personified as being “awake” with a “watchfulness” that ensures that it is
“never off guard” as it purposefully pursues its malicious schemes (32, 100).
Throughout the novel, Eleanor is searching for friendship and love. She
constantly repeats the phrase “journeys end in lovers meeting” showing her
desire to find companionship during her stay at the house (34-234). As the
haunting of Eleanor becomes more intense, it is unclear whether the emanations
are real and perceived by all the guests or are only in Eleanor’s mind as she
wonders, “how can these others hear the noise when it is coming from inside my
head?” (191). While she once felt trapped by the house, by the end of the novel
Eleanor fuses with the house, and she can hear even the “dust drifting gently in
the attics, the wood aging” (213). No longer is the house cold and hostile in
her mind, but rather the dearest lover she has been seeking--even if to embrace
it she must also embrace her own demise.
Shirley Jackson’s novel reminds me of
the Female Gothic genre I read about on Wikipedia pioneered by Radcliffe and
Reeve. I’m thinking that novel is likely a psychological exploration of a
depressed woman lost in the maze of her own mind, a common Gothic theme, but
wondering about why specifically it reached an audience in the 1950’s. This led
me on an article search on JSTOR where I turned up an article by Angela Hague in
a women’s studies magazine. Hague writes that, “by focusing on her female
characters’ isolation, loneliness, and fragmenting identities, their
simultaneous inability to relate to the world outside themselves or to function
autonomously, and their confrontation with an inner emptiness that often results
in mental illness, Jackson displays in pathological terms the position of many
women in the 1950’s” (74). Housewives often felt confined within the walls of
their own home just as Eleanor Vance feels at Hill House. The domestic sphere
called to them, and they were socially unable to resist their fate as homemakers
which led to many documented cases of depression during this time (75).
According to Hague, Jackson’s “recurring themes” throughout her work, to which
The Haunting of Hill House is no
exception, “signify more than her own psychological difficulties; rather, they
reflect the complexities and contradictions, the fears and anxieties, that made
up the postwar American experience” (90). Like everything I’ve studied thus far,
Shirley Jackson’s novel is a reflection of the fears of her own society, that
can also be read with an eye towards social commentary like Wilde’s
The Picture of Dorian Gray.
1.
Jackson, Shirley. The
Haunting of Hill House. Penguin Books, 2013.
2.
Hague, Angela. “‘A
Faithful Anatomy of Our Times’: Reassessing Shirley Jackson.” Frontiers: A
Journal of Women Studies, vol. 26, no. 2, 2005, pp. 73–96. JSTOR,
JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/4137397.
Conclusion
This project really flew by. I feel like I’ve barely
started and did not exhaust or even get have a chance to get to much of the
material I had planned for this journal at the outset of my journey. I came away
with a much better understanding of the genre of the Gothic as a whole and am
impressed by its flexibility and persistence as it is a genre that has been
historically critically panned. I feel like Horror is indeed just the Gothic
under a modern name, but with added tropes that incorporate the different media
we have in the present in our high-budget age of TV and film. Curious to see
what the Netflix adaption of The Haunting
of Hill House had to offer the modern audience for scares, I watched the
pilot episode and noticed a modern link to the past. Like the hills that pressed
in upon Hill House, creating its claustrophobic space, the camera consistently
pressed in towards the characters in a torturous slow zoom in scenes, like it
was unable to be still, but instead, had to create the same sense of impending
doom for the modern viewer that the book gave the past reader. While I am not
able to fully explore my topic, I do hope to continue my research one day, and
this observation from the Netflix adaption is promising as a proof of the
continuing evolution of the genre.
Through the study of the Gothic and Horror genres, we
learn about ourselves, and also of past cultures. By deconstructing subject
matter that sends chills down our spines we can learn what we as a society fear
are the dark parts of ourselves, or the things that are too difficult to deal
with explicitly and must be explored through the supernatural. The Gothic/Horror
genre allows us to get in touch with our deep-seated anxieties and allows us to
flirt with death safely as “shiver by shiver, we gain insight” into our own
minds. (Del Toro xiv)
1.
“Steven Sees a Ghost.”
The Haunting of Hill House, season 1,
episode 1. 2018. Netflix,
https://www.netflix.com/watch/80189222?trackId=200257859
2.
Del Toro,
Guillermo and Joshi, S. T., editor. “Haunted Castles, Dark Mirrors.” American
Supernatural Tales.
Penguin Books Ltd, 2013.
"Great Star" flag of pre-Civil War USA