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The Gothic Novel: Terror, the Supernatural, and the Dark Side of Romanticism

“I wept and I prayed, and I struggled with despair.” — Ann Radcliffe, The Romance of the Forest, 1791

The Gothic novel was one of the most popular and influential literary forms of the Romantic period. Emerging in the 1760s and 1770s with Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764) and Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), the Gothic novel took the deeper anxieties of the age — political upheaval, religious doubt, the dark side of reason, the secret history of the family — and gave them a powerful symbolic vocabulary. Ruined castles, secret passages, persecuted heroines, villainous aristocrats, ghosts, vampires, and the lurking supernatural all became standard features of a genre that continues to flourish in our own day.

The Origins of the Gothic Novel

The Gothic novel grew out of a constellation of mid-eighteenth-century concerns. The rediscovery of medieval literature and architecture, the popularity of graveyard poetry, the fashionable interest in the supernatural and the macabre, the new philosophical interest in the dark side of human nature, and the political anxieties of the post-Revolutionary era all contributed to its rise.

The founding text is Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764), a short, sensational story set in a medieval castle haunted by an ancient curse. Ann Radcliffe, in novels like The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) and The Italian (1797), developed the form with a serious psychological and aesthetic ambition. The Radcliffean Gothic featured an innocent heroine trapped in a sunless castle, a mysterious villain-monk, secret chambers, hidden manuscripts, and an atmosphere of “the supernatural explained away” — the apparent supernatural turned out, in the end, to have natural causes.

The “male Gothic” developed in different directions. Matthew “Monk” Lewis’s The Monk (1796) used the form for a lurid, sensational exploration of religious corruption, sexual transgression, and supernatural evil. William Beckford’s Vathek (1786), written in French by an English eccentric, combined Oriental fantasy with Gothic horror in a form that would later influence Byron, Beckford’s followers, and the great Oriental tales of the Romantics.

The Conventions of the Gothic Novel

The Gothic novel developed a highly recognizable set of conventions that would be imitated, parodied, and reworked for centuries.

Setting — ruined castles, monasteries, abbeys, caves, dark forests, and wild landscapes; the architecture and atmosphere of the medieval past.
Heroine — innocent, beautiful, sensitive, often orphaned or otherwise unprotected; persecuted by a villain; in danger of losing her virtue or her sanity.
Hero — sensitive, often weak, sometimes already imprisoned or persecuted; sometimes revealed, in the Radcliffean manner, to be the rightful heir or the long-lost relative of the heroine.
Villain — aristocratic, magnetic, often a monk, a count, or some figure of corrupt religious or political power; the embodiment of tyranny, lust, or vengeful obsession.
The supernatural — ghosts, demons, curses, mysterious sounds, animated statues, bleeding portraits, secret doors; in some works explained away at the end, in others allowed to remain genuinely supernatural.
The past as a present force — the sins, crimes, and curses of earlier generations return to haunt the present; the family history is also the national or political history.

The Major Gothic Novels and Novelists

The major works of the Gothic novel include:

Horace Walpole, The Castle of Otranto (1764)
Clara Reeve, The Old English Baron (1778)
Ann Radcliffe, The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), The Italian (1797)
Matthew “Monk” Lewis, The Monk (1796)
William Beckford, Vathek (1786)
Mary Shelley, Frankenstein (1818)
Charles Robert Maturin, Melmoth the Wanderer (1820)
James Hogg, The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824)
Charles Brockden Brown, Wieland (1798) and Edgar Huntly (1799)
E.T.A. Hoffmann, The Devil’s Elixirs (1815–16) and the tales collected as The Sandman and The Golden Pot

The American branch of the tradition developed in the works of Charles Brockden Brown, Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Herman Melville. The page on dark romanticism explores this important strand of the movement.

The Romantic Novel and the Gothic

The Gothic novel did not stand alone — it fed into and shaped the larger tradition of the Romantic novel. Sir Walter Scott’s historical novels combined Gothic atmosphere with serious historical reconstruction. The Brontës’ novels — Jane Eyre (1847) and Wuthering Heights (1847) — drew on Gothic conventions to create some of the most powerful psychological fiction in the language. The “sensation novel” of the 1860s and 1870s — Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White (1859), Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret (1862) — was a direct descendant of the Romantic Gothic. And the great modern genre of science fiction, beginning with Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, was born out of the Gothic novel.

The Long Afterlife of the Gothic

The Gothic novel did not die with the Romantic period. It found new life in the Victorian period, in late-nineteenth-century Decadent and Symbolist fiction, in the twentieth-century Southern Gothic of Faulkner, O’Connor, and McCullers, in the Southern African fiction of Coetzee, in the contemporary Gothic of Toni Morrison, in popular fiction from Stephen King to Anne Rice, and in the vast genre of vampire, werewolf, and haunted-house fiction that dominates popular entertainment today. Our pages on Symbolism and Decadence and modern romanticism trace some of these continuities.

A Close Reading: The Opening of Frankenstein

“I am by birth a Genevese, and my family is one of the most distinguished of that republic. My ancestors had been for many years counsellors and syndics, and my father had filled several public situations with honour and reputation. He was respected by all who knew him for his integrity and indefatigable attention to public business. He passed his younger days perpetually occupied by the affairs of his country; a variety of circumstances had prevented his marrying early, nor was it until the decline of life that he became a husband and the father of a family.” — Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, 1818 (Volume I, Letter 1)

Three observations on what Shelley is doing in this opening.

The first is that the novel opens with letters, not with the story. Frankenstein is, technically, an epistolary novel — a frame within a frame, in which Captain Walton tells the story of Victor Frankenstein, who tells the story of the creature, who in turn tells his own story. The choice of the letter form is, in 1818, an old-fashioned one (the great age of the English epistolary novel was the 1740s–60s), and the choice is deliberate. Shelley is signalling that Frankenstein is, in form, a pre-Romantic novel — a Bildungsroman in the manner of Wilhelm Meister (1795–96) — and that the contemporary Gothic form, with its ruined castles and persecuted heroines, will be interrupted by something more serious.

The second is the father. The opening paragraph is, in the editor’s view, a paragraph about fatherhood. Victor’s father, “respectable,” “indefatigable,” a “counsellor” of the Genevan republic, is a portrait of the Enlightenment father — the rational, public-spirited, late-married man. The novel is, in part, the story of a son who refuses the inheritance of that father and creates, in the Promethean manner, an alternative. The novel is also, more darkly, the story of what happens to the son who does so: he ends the book alone, in the Arctic, pursuing the creature he made, his friends and family dead, his scientific ambitions in ruins. The Promethean Romantic rebellion is, in Shelley’s reading, fatal to the rebel and to everyone near him.

The third is the frame. The novel opens with Walton writing to his sister in England. The frame is, in part, a structural device (it allows Shelley to tell a story that, on its own terms, could not be told), but it is also a moral device. Walton is, in his own right, an aspirant Romantic — he is going to the North Pole in the name of “the marvellous” and “the wonderful.” Victor’s story is, for Walton, a warning: the Romantic rebellion against the Enlightenment father is dangerous to the rebel and to everyone who loves him. The novel is, in this sense, not the founding text of science fiction; it is also one of the founding critiques of Romanticism, written by the daughter of Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin.

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