A Guide to the Gothic

The Gothic is my favourite genre of book, but it has recently come to my attention (thanks, mum) that some people don't really know what it is. I've been doing a lot of reading on Romanticism (a literary movement from the 1780s -1830s) recently for an essay, and one text that keeps on coming up is Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, a classic Gothic horror that I have been meaning to read for some time and have finally been inspired to buy a copy of. In the spirit of this latest acquisition I thought I'd explain my understanding of my favourite genre.

The Gothic genre originated with Horace Walpole's 1764 novel The Castle of Otranto (another one on my to-read list) and has had a variety of contributors over the centuries. The name is a reference to the Medieval Gothic architecture that frequently made up the settings of early Gothic novels, and the genre is defined by an aesthetic of fear and haunting. From my experience, other staples of the genre include: old buildings (think castles and remote manor houses), damsels in distress, the supernatural, bad dreams and general feelings of unease and gloom.

What I love most about the genre is the massive variety in setting and style you can find in gothic novels whilst they still share the same themes and story beats that I enjoy so much. You can find social and political commentary in novels like Dracula, Frankenstein, and The Portrait of Dorian Grey, disturbed love stories in the works of Daphne Du Maurier, as well as effort to poke fun at tropes of the genre in Northanger Abbey and Mexican Gothic. Another feature of Mexican Gothic that I enjoyed was the way that it adapts a traditionally European genre to Mexico and uses it to comment on colonialism whilst still delivering the horrifying story you'd expect from a Gothic novel. To a similar effect, in Beloved Toni Morrison taps in to the Gothic and ghosts to deliver a Nobel-prize winning commentary on the struggles of African Americans following the American Civil War.

And that's all there is to it. Some of the classic novels can be difficult to break in to, but once you do they contain unmatched creepy vibes and you get to boast to your friends that you've read a classic novel - not that I read classics for the bragging rights, or anything.

Happy reading!