I think I found an example of the equivoque gothic you described in a short story by Charlotte Perkins Gilman called "The Yellow Wallpaper." It's about a turn-of-the-century woman who is imprisoned in an old house to recover from mental illness, you know how women were treated in those days if they decided to think for themselves. She is forbidden to use her imagination, read, or think at all for that matter. And at first she tries not to. But she's too imaginative, she starts seeing a woman imprisoned in the pattern in the wallpaper and she goes mad eventually.
| gothic literature |
 |
 |
 |
| Written by i j |
| Thursday, 20 January 2011 15:47 |
I’m not a literature expert, in deed I’m not more than a fool amateur but I wanted to know a little bit more about gothic literature so I started looking around and I found some information that I wanted to share with you. If you want to add, discuss or complete anything… all contributions are welcome.
All started when with a book in my hands I asked, when did it all began? I mean, who was the first on writing a book which could be considered as gothic literature?
Y started to look for the answer and as always in this life, when you search, you find, not always what you are looking for, but you always find something, and in this case I found some interesting information.
It seems that gothic literature started during the romanticism, so at the end of XVIII century, I think that we can say that it’s a young genre since it doesn’t have more than 250 years old, anyway being a such special genre I’m happy that it lasted until today, thanks to it’s fans, people like us and people like us who live before us.
Well and answering the first question: The very first gothic book was “the castle of Otranto” written by Horace Warpole in 1764.
But since then the gothic literature has evolved, it suffered such an evolution that nowadays its divided in four different subgenres, in my opinion it couldn’t be otherwise, gothic world is such creative that it’s impossible to keep it in a corset… Maybe that’s why we love so much the corsets? We will talk about that in any other occasion.
The fact is that today we have 4 types of gothic literature, the equivoque goth literature, the supernatural gothic literature, the historical gothic literature and the natural gothic literature.
The first one makes reference to that which is written with ambiguity, maybe because it’s main character is a demented guy with a distortion on the reality perception, I never read anything like this although when reading this subgenre in the net I liked how it sounded. Anyone knows any title that could share with us?
The supernatural gothic literature consists in some unexplainable events that imply supernatural characters… or at least those that doesn’t have a explanation by the modern science, ghosts, zombies and other creatures of the night are some examples of this beings.
Natural gothic literature is opposed to that concept, it includes all histories that could be explained and are plausible in the actual world, lot of them start seeming as supernatural ones but as the plot unfolds you understand that the history is based on real events.
Historic gothic literature includes all histories that happened in the past, it’s not needed that the history is based in real life events, in deed this genre could be mixed with any of the others having for example a supernatural historical gothic literature book.
Although it’s quite complex to find real join nexus for all the gothic literature, it’s true that we can find some recurrent aspects:
In less quantity but still quite relevant we can find reference to mental trauma, gore and violence, it’s common to find supernatural beings… in deed they even have their own subgenre…
Another recurrent aspect is that the main character use to be a female figure (not always human… not always alive, but feminine in the end) that founds herself in death threat or even worst a threat that goes beyond death, obliged to perform actions that she don’t want to make and take decisions she doesn’t want to take surrounded by an oppressive ambient where the only light tends to be herself.
Why most of gothic literature writers are female? I don’t know but that’s the case, if you know Spanish language I recommend you to take a look to the gothic tales written by the readers of this website sister www.kulturagotika.com and you will notice that most writers are female (if you want to share with us your writings as they did, please feel free to send us your texts to This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it and we will publish them… ¡¡thanks in advance!!).
And that links me with previous question, why most of the main characters are female too? I’m a really old role-player gamer… And I have the theory that when you give someone the opportunity to choose a character freely they tend to chose or a reflect of themselves or a reflect of what they would like to be.
Do you identify yourself with your characters? do you wish to be one of them?I don’t know to whom I’m asking this question but if anyone can answer it, please answer…
Another great aspect of the gothic literature is that it’s almost impossible to know how it’s the book going to end. Yeah, I know that most books in the world tend to be original in this aspect, but let be serious, when I readed the Lord Of The Rings and saw that the main character was a lovely hobbit I knew that the tale wouldn’t end quite bad…
When talking about this a friend of mine argued that when you read gothic literature you know that it’s not going to end quite well either but I do not agree with that.
I do not agree because even there aren’t many chances of the history ending with all main characters around a colorful birthday cake singing and eating turkey, in deed that ending wouldn’t be good for the protagonist.
I mean, she doesn’t want that, maybe the book ending couldn’t be considered as a good ending by a large portion of the society but it’s what the main character considers a good ending. Who are we for denying that?
Of course it could haven too that the history ends really bad or even worst, but hey, if we have learn something is that this world isn’t perfect, maybe it’s time to stop deceiving ourselves denying the reality that surrounds us, Gothic literature gets a real end for your history, not a fairy tale ending.
I don’t have much more to add to this article, some time ago a Spanish reader leaved us a big list of vampire books that worth’s to be read, I would like to have something similar in English or even better create a directory of gothic literature books (vampiric or not). Anyone wants to do it?
It’s something easy, you just have to pick some gothic books tittles and write a small text of what’s it about, and maybe your personal opinion, not more than a paragraph each.
Enjoy your life… while you still can.
Comments (7)
Powered by !JoomlaComment 4.0 beta2
|
| Last Updated on Thursday, 20 January 2011 15:54 |
