Category: Gothic

The Elegy

I assumed an elegy was a lament for the dead; a sermon or poem to recognize the unique loss and the tragedy of permanent absence. I was wrong! (Well, and also right.) Early definitions of elegy described a certain form. Rhyming couplets in a certain rhythmic pattern. Elegies from the classical era might be about death but could also be erotic or tell a tale of myth.

Only when the English started writing elegiac poetry did it become closely associated with mourning.

In the 17th century some English poets still wrote elegies in the broadest sense. It looks like it was after the English Civil Wars and the Restoration that the English elegy became almost exclusively about commemorating death or tragedy.

Just as Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto was a pivotal point in the development of the Gothic, so was Thomas Gray’s Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard.

Coincidentally, Gray and Walpole were close friends, touring Europe together for a couple of years. More about their relationship in a future post.

The boast of heraldry, the pomp of pow’r,
And all that beauty, all that wealth e’er gave,
Awaits alike th’ inevitable hour.
The paths of glory lead but to the grave.

excerpt from Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard by Thomas Gray.

Poetry of the Graveyard

Where am I in the Gothic research?

I’m in the midst of a deep dive in English elegiac poetry of the early 18th century. Long before these symbols and allusions were distilled into a Gothic spirit, English poetry was haunted with ruins and graveyards, melancholy and ghosts.

Depending on which history or critic you are reading this kind of poetry is described as melancholy or pensive. It is often elegiac. And, contemporaneously, much of it is grouped under the umbrella of graveyard poetry, or the graveyard school. Some of it may have had direct influence on the Gothic literature but all of it contributed to a tone, or sensibility, that was embraced and heightened by the Gothic authors.

My Fancy palls, and takes Distast[e] at Pleasure;
My Soul grows out of Tune, it loaths the World,
Sickens at all the Noise and Folly of it;
And I could sit me down in some dull Shade,
Where lonely Contemplation keeps her Cave,
And dwells with hoary Hermits; there forget my self,
There fix my stupid Eyes upon the Earth,
And muse a way an Age in deepest Melancholy.

The tragedy of the Lady Jane Gray by Nicholas Rowe
a play in verse
published in 1715

One thing that stands out in this research is how transgressive poetry could be during this era as long as it ended with some sort of exultation of faith. You could write all sorts of horrid scenes as long as you ended with a warning that such moral transgressions would be punished, or that embracing the Christian faith would free one from the horrors described. The Gothic lit of the 1790s (and later) simply did away with the moralizing frame (for the most part) and piled up the frightful imagery. Long before Elmore Leonard the Gothic authors embraced his advice to writers to “leave out the parts that readers skip.”

Here is an an example of early 18th-century melancholy English poetry. Lady Chudleigh describes a melancholy life but reveals in the final sentence that everything will ok because the devout will awaken in heaven after death.

On the Vanities of this Life: A Pindarick Ode
by Lady Mary Chudleigh
published 1703

1.

What makes fond Man the trifle Life desire,
And with such Ardor court his Pain?
‘Tis Madness, worse than Madness, to admire
What brings Ten thousand Miseries in its Train:
To each soft moment, Hours of Care succeed,
And for the Pleasures of a Day,
With Years of Grief we pay;
So much our lasting Sorrows, our fleeting Joys exceed.
In vain, in vain, we Happiness pursue,
That mighty Blessing is not here;
That, like the false misguiding Fire,
Is farthest off, when we believe it near:
Yet still we follow till we tire,
And in the fatal Chase Expire:
Each gaudy nothing which we view,
We fancy is the wish’d for Prize,
Its painted Glories captivate our Eyes;
Blinded by Pride, we hug our own Mistake,
And foolishly adore that Idol which we make.

2.

Some hope to find it on the Coasts of Fame,
And hazard all to gain a glorious Name;
Proud of Deformity and Scars,
They seek for Honour in the bloodiest Wars;
On Dangers, unconcern’d, they run,
And Death it self disdain to shun:
This, the Rich with Wonder see,
And fancy they are happier far
Than those deluded Heroes are:
But this, alas! is their Mistake;
They only dream that they are blest,
For when they from their pleasing Slumbers wake,
They’ll find their Minds with Swarms of Cares opprest,
So crouded, that no part is free
To entertain Felicity:
The Pain to get, and Fear to lose,
Like Harpies, all their Joys devour:
Who such a wretched Life wou’d chuse?
Or think those happy who must Fortune trust?
That fickle Goddess is but seldom just.
Exterior things can ne’er be truly good,
Because within her Pow’r;
This the wise Ancients understood,
And only wish’d for what wou’d Life sustain;
Esteeming all beyond superfluous and vain.

3.

Some think the Great are only blest,
Those God-like Men who shine above the rest:
In whom united Glories meet,
And all the lower World pay Homage at their Feet:
On their exalted Heights they sit in State,
And their Commands bind like the Laws of Fate:
Their Regal Scepters, and their glitt’ring Crowns,
Imprint an awful Fear in ev’ry Breast:
Death shoots his killing Arrows thro’ their Frowns;
Their Smiles are welcom, as the Beams of Light
Were to the infant World, when first it rose from Night.
Thus, in the Firmament of Pow’r above,
Each in his radiant Sphere does move,
Remote from common View;
Th’ admiring Croud with Wonder gaze,
The distant Glories their weak Eyes amaze:
But cou’d they search into the Truth of Things,
Cou’d they but look into the Thoughts of Kings;
If all their hidden Cares they knew,
Their Jealousies, their Fears, their Pain,
And all the Troubles of their Reign,
They then wou’d pity those they now admire;
And with their humble State content, wou’d nothing more desire.

4.

If any thing like Happiness is here,
If any thing deserves our Care,
‘Tis only by the Good possest;
By those who Virtue’s Laws obey,
And cheerfully proceed in her unerring Way;
Whose Souls are cleans’d from all the Dregs of Sin,
From all the base Alloys of their inferior Part,
And fit to harbour that Celestial Guest,
Who ne’r will be confin’d
But to a holy Breast.
The pure and spotless Mind,
Has all within
That the most boundless Wish can crave;
The most aspiring Temper hope to have:
Nor needs the Helps of Art,
Nor vain Supplies of Sense,
Assur’d of all in only Innocence.

5.

Malice and Envy, Discontent, and Pride,
Those fatal Inmates of the Vicious Mind,
Which into dang’rous Paths th’ unthinking Guide,
Ne’er to the pious Breast admittance find.
As th’ upper Region is Serene and clear,
No Winds, no Clouds are there,
So with perpetual Calms the virtuous Soul is blest,
Those Antepasts of everlasting Rest:
Like some firm Rock amidst the raging Waves
She stands, and their united Force outbraves;
Contends, till from her Earthly Shackles free,
She takes her flight
Into immense Eternity,
And in those Realms of unexhausted Light,
Forgets the Pressures of her former State.
O’er-joy’d to find her self beyond the reach of Fate.

6.

O happy Place! where ev’ry thing will please,
Where neither Sickness, Fear, nor Strife,
Nor any of the painful Cares of Life,
Will interrupt her Ease:
Where ev’ry Object charms the Sight,
And yields fresh Wonder and Delight,
Where nothing’s heard but Songs of Joy,
Full of Extasie Divine,
Seraphick Hymns! which Love inspire,
And fill the Breast with sacred Fire:
Love refin’d from drossy Heat,
Rais’d to a Flame sublime and great,
In ev’ry Heav’nly Face do’s shine,
And each Celestial Tongue employ:
What e’er we can of Friendship know,
What e’er we Passion call below,
Does but a weak Resemblance bear,
To that blest Union which is ever there,
Where Love, like Life, do’s animate the whole,
As if it were but one blest individual Soul.

7.

Such as a lasting Happiness would have,
Must seek it in the peaceful Grave,
Where free from Wrongs the Dead remain.
Life is a long continu’d Pain,
A lingring slow Disease.
Which Remedies a while may ease,
But cannot work a perfect Cure:
Musick with its inchanting Lays,
May for a while our Spirits raise,
Honour and Wealth may charm the Sense,
And by their pow’rful Influence
May gently lull our Cares asleep;
But when we think our selves secure,
And fondly hope we shall no future Ills endure,
Our Griefs awake again,
And with redoubl’d Rage augment our Pain:
In vain we stand on our Defence,
In vain a constant Watch we keep,
In vain each Path we guard;
Unseen into our Souls they creep,
And when they once are there, ’tis very hard
With all our Strength to force them thence;
Like bold Intruders on the whole they seize,
A Part will not th’ insatiate Victors please.

8.

In vain, alas! in vain,
We Reason’s Aid implore,
That will but add a quicker Sense of Pain,
But not our former Joys restore:
Those few who by strict Rules their Lives have led,
Who Reason’s Laws attentively have read;
Who to its Dictates glad Submission pay,
And by their Passions never led astray,
Go resolutely on in its severest Way,
Could never solid Satisfaction find:
The most that Reason can, is to persuade the Mind,
Its Troubles decently to bear,
And not permit a Murmur, or a Tear,
To tell th’ inquiring World that any such are there:
But while we strive our Suff’rings to disown,
And blush to have our Frailties known;
While from the publick View our Griefs we hide,
And keep them Pris’ners in our Breast,
We seem to be, but are not truly blest;
What like Contentment looks, is but th’ Effect of Pride:
From it we no advantage win,
But are the same we were before,
The smarting Pains corrode us still within;
Confinement do’s but make them rage the more:
Upon the vital Stock they prey,
And by insensible degrees they wast our Life away.

9.

In vain from Books we hope to gain Relief,
Knowledge does but increase our Grief:
The more we read, the more we find
Of th’ unexhausted Store still left behind:
To dig the wealthy Mine we try,
No Pain, no Labour spare;
But the lov’d Treasure too profound does lie,
And mocks our utmost Industry:
Like some inchanted Isle it does appear;
The pleas’d Spectator thinks it near;
But when with wide spread Sails he makes to shore,
His Hopes are lost, the Phantom’s seen no more:
Asham’d, and tir’d, we of Success despair,
Our fruitless Studies we repent,
And blush to see, that after all our Care,
After whole Years on tedious Volumes spent,
We only darkly understand
That which we thought we fully knew;
Thro’ Labyrinths we go without a Clue,
Till in the dang’rous Maze our selves we lose,
And neither know which Path t’avoid, or which to chuse.
From Thought to Thought, our restless Minds are tost,
Like Ship-wreck’d Mariners we seek the Land,
And in a Sea of Doubts are almost lost.
The Phœnix Truth wrapt up in Mists does lie,
Not to be clearly seen before we die;
Not till our Souls free from confining Clay,
Open their Eyes in everlasting Day.

Gap in the Literature – Economic Precarity and the Gothic Novel part 1: Walpole

It’s possible this scholarship is out there and I just haven’t found it. But I don’t see a lot about economic precarity and the Gothic novel.

Let me start with Walpole.

While Walpole lived a life of privilege and doesn’t seem to have faced any real financial crisis in his life, he lived in a world of economic precarity. He had acquaintances who went to debtor’s prison. He was often mocked for using cheap materials to fulfill his vision of Strawberry Hill House (some elements were constructed with papier–mâché, or illusions were added with trompe-l’œil methods). His aspirations were bigger than his budget. So, while economic hardship never seriously disrupted his life, he was surrounded by it.

Perhaps it’s this environment that led him to be fascinated by old castles and the ghosts that haunt them.

Walpole’s dream of a romantic past is saturated with wealth. It takes a lot of money and human resources to build and maintain a castle. One (or many) must be able to marshal daily meals for the work force and for the working animals. You have to pay the crafts people. You have to be able to protect everyone and everything. Walpole’s Castle of Otranto contains a yearning for power, and the wealth that allows one to achieve that power.

This yearning for wealth and power became one of the principle tropes of the Gothic novel. Perhaps the most significant trope. We see it thread its way through almost every Gothic work and adapted by romance works targeted to female audiences.

Some women facing personal economic precarity were able to find success through writing gothic. And other women, also confronted with economic precarity, turned to the fantasies of glorious wealth to escape the reality of their own financial limits.

There’s a lot to unpack here. I’m going to turn to the following in the next few posts.

Next: Women consume a lot of works addressing economic precarity and fantasies of escaping into economic security.

Next: Ann Radcliffe Makes Bank

Next: Banditti Are Everywhere

Next: Gothic Writers Doing It For The Money

Next: Mid-20th Century Gothic Obsession with Stuff and Things Rich People Have

The Burkean Sublime

I think of sublime as something that invokes a sense of awe.

In the 18th century Edmund Burke wrote about the philosophy about taste and gave sublimity a unique spin that became quite popular with writers of Gothic and Romantic literature.

The sublime, for Burke, was inextricably interwoven with fear.

“Whatever is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain, and danger, that is to say, whatever is in any sort terrible, or is conversant about terrible objects, or operates in a manner analogous to terror, is a source of the sublime; that is, it is productive of the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling.”

So, the sublime is the strongest emotion the mind is capable of feeling, and what sparks that emotion is anything that:

  • excites ideas of pain,
  • excites ideas of danger,
  • is in any way terrible,
  • is conversant with terrible subjects,
  • operates in a manner analagous to terror.

For Burke the sublime equals pain, danger, and terror, and these feelings are the strongest human emotions. The emotion of pain is stronger than the emotion of pleasure.

Burke also argues that once one gains some distance from terror there is an ineluctable delight to be had.

“When danger or pain press too nearly, they are incapable of giving any delight, and are simply terrible; but at certain distances, and with certain modifications, they may be, and they are delighful, as we every day experience.”

And this is the seed of Gothic/Horror/Terror fiction according to Burke. As long as we can have some distance from the experience, pain, danger, fear, and terror can be delightful. And the success of these types of stories is rooted in their ability to engage the most deeply felt human emotions.

Burke, for those unfamiliar with the name, has long stood as one of the intellectual founders of modern conversative political theory. You may remember from some US history class that Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man, defending the French Revolution, was written as a response to Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France, condemning the revolution.

Originally, this post contained a long meditation about the connection between conservative political ideology and horror. It quickly became unwieldy and riddled with qualifiers and confusion. I decided I needed more background info before I could write cogently about the connection between horror and conservativism.

To that end I’m starting with The Philosophy of Horror or Paradoxes of the Heart by Noel Carroll (review). Carroll addresses this concept specifically. More later!

The Themes, Gothic and Otherwise

This post is to help me organize some of the broad themes percolating around my Gothic project.

One of the early sparks was reading Gail Carriger’s Heroine’s Journey. I realized I’d never really read many books/stories, or watched many movies/shows that were marketed for women. Despite my white, male, cishet, middle-class liberal proclamations about how I’m interested in all things human, and the human experience, I seemed to have meticulously avoided much that wasn’t directly marketed to white, cishet, male, middle-class me. heh. *embarrassed blush*

It turns out my claim to Terence’s motto — “I am human, and I think nothing human is alien to me” — is, despite my naive good intentions, a load of horseshit. Most of human experience is alien to me, and often because of specific choices I have made, intentionally or not.

So, rolling around in the back of my brain was this idea that I wanted to find an entry into reading romance. Easy enough to do in practice but I wanted some kind of framework so that maybe I could write about it.

So, one theme is reading/watching works created for a female audience.

One example of this are movies of the 1940s. While men in Britain and the US were displaced because of the war, movie studios made some movies targeted to women. The Wikipedia entry for Woman’s Films discusses this.

“The woman’s film genre was particularly popular in 1930s and 1940s, reaching its zenith during World War II. The film industry of that time had an economic interest in producing such films as women were believed to comprise a majority of movie-goers. In line with this perception, many woman’s films were prestigious productions which attracted some of the best stars and directors.”

The second theme I expect to write about/mull over, is my body as an object. I clearly objectify my own body in ways I barely recognize and I’m sure in ways I don’t recognize at all. I also live in a world and in a time where the human body is often considered a collection of objects. My recent experience living with an external bladder attached to my internal kidney highlighted this. (I was a wetware cyborg!)

The third is to think more about the tropes surrounding Gothic literature: hauntings, the supernatural, ruins, etc. And to learn more about the cultural trappings surrounding peaks of Gothic production.

So the three threads I want to braid together in this project are:

  • reading works created for women and to-this-point ignored by me;
  • meditating and writing about my conceptions of my body and bodies in general;
  • the tropes of Gothic literature and cinema, a set of lenses I can use to study whatever I’m thinking of at the moment.

Initially this all added up to exploring Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, especially the creature and its manifestations since its inception. But as the project ferments I see I’ll want to broaden it somewhat. Shelley’s work will still play an important role but perhaps not quite so central as I once thought.

Bibliography/Filmography so far

Project started August 2023.

Books and articles

Asma, Stephen T. On monsters: An unnatural history of our worst fears. Oxford University Press, 2011. – Not very useful for this project.

Brown, Sherri L., Carol A. Senf, and Ellen Justine Stockstill. A Research Guide to Gothic Literature in English : Print and Electronic Sources. Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield, 2018. – Terrific resource. Helped me identify lots of resources for research. 

Byron, Glennis, and Dale Townshend, eds. The Gothic World. London ; Routledge, 2014. – I need to check this out again. Rich resource.

Carriger, Gail. The Heroine’s Journey: For Writers, Readers, and Fans of Pop Culture. USA: Gail Carriger LLC, 2020. – This is the book that really got me thinking about work produced specifically for female audiences. (This will turn out to be one of the major threads of this project – I am haunted by misogyny in ways I still don’t/barely recognize.)

Clery E. J. 1999. The Rise of Supernatural Fiction 1762-1800 1St pbk. ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. – Roughly covers gothic literature but through the lens of the supernatural instead of Gothic.

Chandrasekera, Vajra. “Walpolitics.” January 25, 2024. https://vajra.me/2024/01/25/walpolitics/ – interesting take on the term “serendipity” coined by Horace Walpole.

Copley, Stephen, and John Whale, eds. Beyond Romanticism: New Approaches to Texts and Contexts 1780-1832. Routledge, 2016. – collection of essays. Mostly interested in “The wanton muse : politics and gender in Gothic theory after 1760” by Harriet Guest, which I read but don’t remember. 

Fothergill, Brian. The Strawberry Hill Set: Horace Walpole and His Circle. Faber & Faber, 2013. – Looks at Walpole’s circle of friends. Divides Walpole’s circle of friendships – strawberry, politics, literature, schoolhood friends, antiquaries, last years. Mostly off-topic for this project. Somewhat useful description of Walpole’s friendship with Thomas Gray.

Gaunt, Peter. Oliver Cromwell. Vol. 5. NYU Press, 2004. – Brief sketch of Cromwell’s life. Read for background.

Gordon, Charlotte. Romantic Outlaws : The Extraordinary Lives of Mary Wollstonecraft and Her Daughter Mary Shelley. First U.S. edition. New York: Random House, 2015. – Excellent book. Interesting parallel structure. Well written. The structure might be problematic on a scholarly/academic level, but definitely an enjoyable read. 

Hoeveler, Diane Long. Gothic feminism: the professionalization of gender from Charlotte Smith to the Brontës. Penn State Press, 1998. – Great book. Hoeveler is key scholar. Need to reread this after a few months of research.

Modleski Tania. 19841982. Loving with a Vengeance : Mass-Produced Fantasies for Women. New York: Methuen. – Early critical analysis of Harlequin Romance. Also a section on Gothic Romance and a chapter on soap operas. Notable for being a serious look at mass pop culture created for female consumption. Overly Freudian analysis. Draws some good points from Joanna Russ. Explains the formula of Harlequin (the scoundrel is not a scoundrel).

Mowl, Timothy. Horace Walpole: the great outsider. Faber & Faber, 2014. – Deserves credit for bluntly addressing Walpole’s gender/sexual identity instead of ignoring it or referring to it only obliquely. However, Mowl is not a particularly sophisticated gender historian.

Paige, Lori A. The Gothic Romance Wave: A Critical History of the Mass Market Novels, 1960-1993. McFarland, 2018. – Weak. A few good references. More a defense of mass market gothic romance than a critical analysis. Often contradictory.

Reeve, Matthew M. Gothic architecture and sexuality in the circle of Horace Walpole. Penn State Press, 2020. – Focuses on architecture instead of literature. Wonderful work. Just a really great book. Terrific bibliography. Great collection of images. Pretty nuanced and comprehensive. This book bears returning to toward the end of this research project. Read in January of 2024.  

Russ, Joanna. “On Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley.” To write like a woman: essays in feminism and science fiction. Indiana University Press, 1995. – Not good. Russ doesn’t have a good grasp of Shelley’s work, history, and context.

Russ, Joanna. “Somebody’s Trying to Kill Me and I Think It’s My Husband: The Modern Gothic.” Journal of Popular Culture 6, no. 4 (1973): 666. – Good analysis by professional writer (rather than academic/scholar). Points out the obsession attention clothes and the heroine’s passivity. Great list of tropes at the end.

Uden, James. Spectres of Antiquity: Classical Literature and the Gothic, 1740-1830. Oxford University Press, USA, 2020. – excellent. Worth re-reading.

Urstad Tone Sundt. 1999. Sir Robert Walpole’s Poets : The Use of Literature As Pro-Government Propaganda 1721-1742. Newark Del: University of Delaware Press. – read for background about Walpole-era politics and publishing.

Watt, James. Contesting the Gothic: Fiction, Genre and Cultural Conflict, 1764–1832. Vol. 33. Cambridge University Press, 1999. – Excellent book. Introduces concept of Loyalist Gothic, makes argument that gothic is and has always been contested, and that some works (Walpole, Monk, Waverly) are kind of not-gothic.

Watt William Whyte. (1967)(1932). Shilling Shockers of the Gothic School; a Study of Chapbook Gothic Romances by William W. Watt. New York: Russell & Russell. – slim volume explains a little what shilling shockers are and provides an amused description of several. Shilling Shockers are cheaply published, usually anonymous, often plagiarized popular works. The era’s penny dreadful, or pulp magazine. Readily identified by cheap, pale blue covers.

Fiction

DeMatteis, J. M. and Robert Kanigher, et al. Creature Commandos. Burbank, CA: DC Comics, 2023.

Lewis, Matthew G. The Monk. New York. Grove Press, 1952. – so scandalous!

McGill, C.E. Our Hideous Progeny: A Novel. HarperCollins, 2023. – Novel. About the great-niece of Viktor Frankenstein.

Radcliffe, Ann. The Mysteries of Udolpho. London: Dent, 1962. – I think this may be the wrong citation. Two volumes. Really enjoyed this. 

Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein: the 1818 text. Penguin, 2018.

Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft. The Annotated Frankenstein. Harvard University Press, 2012. – Good. Could be better. 

Walpole, Horace, William Beckford, John William Polidori, George Gordon Byron Byron, and E. F. (Everett Franklin) Bleiler. The Castle of Otranto. New York: Dover Publications, 1966. – So far have only read Otranto. This volume also contains Vathek by Beckford, and Vampyre by Polidori, and some Byron fragments.

Movies with Frankenstein, the Creature, or Mary Shelley

  • Mary Shelley (2017)
  • Gothic (1986)
  • Frankenstein (2004) miniseries
  • The Munsters (Rob Zombie version)(2022)
  • Hotel Transylvania (2012)
  • Depraved (2019) – ptsd
  • Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1994) – branaugh, hb carter, deniro – the worst
  • The Bride (1985)
  • The Strange Life of Frankenstein (2018) – documentary of novel and creature
  • Frankenstein (2015) – Carrie Ann Moss & Danny Huston
  • Frankenstein: The True Story (1973) – written by Christopher Isherwood. Very queer. 
  • Jesse James Meets Frankenstein’s Daughter (1966)
  • The Lazarus Effect (2015) – solid blumhouse entry, good script, realistic performances
  • Frankenstein (2004) – originally both Dean Koontz and Martin Scorsese were involved but both withdrew as production veered off course. Meant to be a pilot for a series. Staring Parker Posey.
  • Frankenstein (miniseries) (2004) – most faithful to the book. Hallmark miniseries of 2 episodes for a total of ~3hrs. 
  • Son of Frankenstein (1939)
  • Ghost of Frankenstein (1942)
  • Frankenstein Meets the Wolfman (1943)
  • House of Frankenstein (1944)
  • Angry Black Girl and Her Monster (2023)
  • House of Dracula (1945)
  • Blackenstein (1973)
  • Curse of Frankenstein (1957)
  • Revenge of Frankenstein (1958)
  • Evil of Frankenstein (1964)
  • Frankenstein Created Woman (1967)
  • Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed (1969)
  • Horror of Frankenstein (1970)
  • Frankenstein and the Monster from Hell (1974)
  • Poor Things (2024) – More of a Re-animator than a Frankenstein.

Gothic Movies, TV Shows, & Series – casting a wide net here since I’m still refining my definition of Gothic and online recommendations are all over the map. I’d probably characterize only about 8 or 9 of the following as Gothic.

  • The Black Sleep (1956)
  • Vampyr (1932)
  • Northanger Abbey (2007)
  • House of Usher (1960)
  • Cat People (1942)
  • My Cousin Rachel (2017)
  • The Batman (2022)
  • Rebecca (1940)
  • Letter From an Unknown Woman (1948) (not gothic but Romance)
  • Suspicion (1941)
  • Fall of the House of Usher (Flanagan mini-series) (2023)
  • Midnight Mass (Flanagan miniseries (2021)
  • Gaslight (1940) – original British version
  • House of Dark Shadows (1970)
  • The Hound of Baskervilles (1959)
  • The Old Dark House (1963)
  • Christmas Carol (many adaptations)
  • Dickensian (miniseries) (2015)
  • The Essex Serpent (2022) – recommended as Gothic. Maybe? But just barely.
  • A Hazard of Hearts (1987)

Serendipity

In addition to helping spawn the Gothic revival Horace Walpole captured one of my favorite experiences when he coined the word ‘serendipity’. It looks like it’s a word that didn’t really catch on until the latter half of the 20th century.

In a letter to his cousin he notes he has an unusual and particular kind of good luck finding just what he’s looking for.

“This discovery, indeed, is almost of that kind which I call Serendipity, a very expressive word, which, as I have nothing better to tell you, I shall endeavor to explain to you: you will understand it better by the derivation than the definition. I once read a silly fairy tale, called “The Three Princes of Serendip”: as their Highnesses travelled, they were always making discoveries, by accidents and sagacity, of things which they were not in quest of.”

The OED defines serendipity: “The faculty of making happy and unexpected discoveries by accident. Also, the fact or an instance of such a discovery.”

Walpole’s attitude about serendipity reminds me of the Wilson/Dick coinage of metanoia as the irrational belief that the universe is out to help you, similar to Rob Brezsny’s use of pronoia as a fundamentally friendly universe giving you what you need when you need it. Wilson, Dick, and Brezsny are all looking for an opposite to paranoia.

I think this Walpolian mindset, the kind that can coin a word like serendipity and can start a novel with a giant helmet falling from the sky, was an important part of Otranto but was lost as the Gothic genre developed.

And I must say, I wasn’t expecting to broaden my understanding of the abderitic when I started this Gothic research, but I think I found an abderitic patron saint.

On a few occasions Walpole signed himself as Democritus in his letters, donning the cloak of the laughing philosopher. Democritus is another, perhaps the first, patron saint of the aberitic, actually being from Abdera. And, while the humorless Kant may have tut-tutted those who see the human experience as a comedy, Democritus saw the human experience as something to laugh about.

Why Gothic?

In the summer of 2023 I was fishing around for some substantive research project to sink myself into. I knew I wanted to write about myself but not wholly about myself. I wanted to intermingle some sort of research I could use as a lens for contemplating my own aging, mortality, existence, etc. 

I eventually arrived at Frankenstein.

Frankenstein is, among other things, all about life and death and the meaning of existence and the body as an object. I would, I decided, do a deep dive into Frankenstein (the book, the creature, the movies and other spin-offs and variations) and use that as a springboard for some more personal reflections. 

On July 31st my back collapsed (I ultimately discovered I have a bulging L1 disc) and that sealed my commitment to writing about Frankenstein.* I read the book, read bios of Mary Shelley, her mother, and watched many, many Frankenstein movies.

As I got deeper into the project I realized I wanted more context (which is my predictable response to most things in life). What works would Mary Shelley be familiar with when she wrote Frankenstein? How unique was her work? Was Frankenstein sui generis or just another drop in a sea of genre work? And so, my research expanded into the Gothic.

Ultimately this is still a research project about Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and the creature (and reflections about my own existence). The final result (if, indeed, there is ever a final result) will most likely be a self-published ebook. The blog will be notes and sketches taken along the way as I sort through the literary, artistic, philosophical, and biographical underpinnings of Mary Shelley’s world, and then follow the development of the creature over the next two centuries.

If you want to follow along you can subscribe (in the right-hand column there is a “subscribe to blog via email” box) or follow on your favorite RSS. I’ll also be re-posting on Tumblr (which is the extent of my social media presence these days).

*I’m better now, though very minor issues continue to linger. For example, I am meeting with a physical therapist on Monday to discuss ways of strengthening my back and my core, and improving my standing and sitting posture. I started yoga last spring and loved it, but I think some of the positions may have been exacerbating the issue.