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So. Today I'm writing about geeky hobbies. Mine in particular. I've been struggling with the definition of a geeky hobby, honestly... Is it something that makes you so happy you geek out about it? Is it a hobby that other people regard as geeky? Is it one that is traditionally "geeky," in the roles of genre fiction and other such off-the-beaten-path hobbies (for certain traditionally male definitions of geek, btw, which is something I could get into here, but won't, unless somebody wants to open that can of tribbles). In the end, I can't decide, so I'm going to post about multiple ones, with all the geekiness that goes along with it. I'm keepin' it real with my inner geekette, yo. *snerk*
So for today, then, I'm going to focus on that thing I love so much I'm kinda making a career out of it -- Gothic literature. Granted, there are many kinds of literature in the world, and I enjoy most of them in one form or another. It's not even my only concentration in lit -- I'm also specializing in Eighteenth-Century lit (which is by definition mostly British, although there are a few American novels right at the tail end -- Charles Brockden Brown, I'm looking at you). And while I do enjoy said 18th Century literature, primarily for the sheer wahoo of it all as well as the whole "wait, you mean I can make a living out of this" sense, as well as the sheer joyfulness with which authors played with this newfangled novel format, it's Gothic literature I'm writing about today.
Gothic literature is one of those things that's sort of difficult to pin down. On the one hand, we have the historical Gothic period of literature, which started about the mid 1700s with The Castle of Otranto (more or less reliably) and ran until about 1800, spawning countless novels much to everyone's surprise, delight, and horror at what kids these days were into. This "terrorist fiction" as it was called then was a return to the fantastic, not as an approved nationalist legend or foreign temptation, but as a means to deliberately make the reader feel by scaring the pants off him or her (pretty often her, but by no means exclusively). It was the progenitor of our modern horror genre, as well as our fantasy, sci-fi, and mystery genres. Romance... well, certainly in the sense of bodice rippers we have a clear line of descent. Realistic romances though were around well before. T'any rate, there you go. Novels with fantastic elements designed to make you feel and experience a catharsis as you studied clear representations of good and evil and felt the pathos and pity and revulsion that surrounded them, as a means of emotional moral instruction.
All that emotional furor is kind of exhausting, though, and by 1800 or so, the Gothic's kind of played out -- or is it? Northanger Abbey, Jane Austen's Gothic parody/homage/satirical commentary was written in 1803, though not published (and not for lack of trying) until after her death over a decade later. It had jumped the shark, to use the modern terminology. People were castled-out. It was an ex-genre. Sort of. The Romantics ran with what they'd loved about the Gothic, though, declaring that people could pry the sublime and their imaginative fiction/poetry from their cold, dead fingers, and not before. They kept the Gothic alive in their own Byronesque way, reinventing it and subverting it to meet their own needs. Frankenstein is proof of that.... the focus on the domestic, on the horror of the body, on inheritances and ambition and gender issues and the sublime played right into their hands. It laid more or less fallow for another thirty years until the mid-1800s, when we start seeing it come back in Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre and so forth. This nineteenth-century Gothic resurgence gave us most of the novels we think of as Gothic today, as well as archetypes that we still keep around and reinvent and use to scare ourselves with. The realist movement was again the death of Gothic for a while, but like any good horror monster, a little death never stands in its way for long. There were always adherents to keep it alive and kicking, if off in the shadows.
Now. Historical Gothic aside, those historical novels built up to a body of work, creating a genre that we also call "Gothic." It's this genre that still persists today, coming back over and over again. It's flexible if not fluid, allowing for a wide breadth of interpretation and variation while still making works that are recognizably "gothic." In essence, the gothic genre consists of a set of conventions (or as I prefer to call tropes, since there's more to them than what I feel conventions hold and they've passed on into movies and television as well). No gothic work needs to have every gothic trope present -- honestly, anything like that would be self-parodying -- the number and type of conventions have only increased with every reinvention it's gone through. The list or tropes is long and no two people seem to fully agree on what it contains; my personal list includes orphans, unattached young women who are somehow set apart (heiresses, scholars, virtuous virgins, etc), secrets, family lines, dopplegangers, houses you can't escape, property lines of inheritance, domestic/romantic relationships, body horror, sex, torture (physical and/or psychological), death, darkness, ghosts, unnatural life (which includes but is not limited to undeath), ruin and decay, exotic locations, dark brooding men, Patriarchy!, monsters, the supernatural (or just the appearance thereof), and so forth. There can also be a significant dominance/submission element at play in the relationships as well, as sexual tension and a little hint of danger and/or kink play large and looming in a lot of the gothic world.
This latter set of gothic, genre gothic, is the one that fascinates me. Sure, we like gothic lit/movies/tv/music because they're sexy, frankly. It's scary, it's a little dangerous, it's fun, and at the end we all go home and have ice cream. Heck, it's been around long enough that we barely even register things as "gothic" any more if there isn't a vampire in a big fuck-off cape or a dark castle that really needs a housekeeper. If it doesn't signpost in neon, we barely consider it. However, take a look at these titles: Gothika. Shutter Island. Twilight. House of Leaves. Evanescence. Game of Thrones. The Shining. Sucker Punch. Psycho. Silence of the Lambs. The Orphanage. Sherlock Holmes. That doesn't even get into things that proudly label themselves as gothic, honestly. Nor does it count things which borrow one or two of these aspects, but not a sufficient number of them for us to really consider them fully gothic, which also happens a lot. We are continually drawn to these tropes over and over again, whether we're conscious of it or not. They run rampant through our culture. For all the hokey aspects of chain-rattling ghosts and exotic transylvanian accents, there's something in these things that continues to draw us in to explore them, something in us that it feeds. These tropes are symbolic of other, deeper meanings, or else why would would they persist in the literary environment as long as they have, with no sign of aging out of the symbolic vocabulary? That's what I want to explore -- that's what draws me in and makes me want to study it and write about it and see what threads I can draw through the larger body of work, as seen against the contemporary cultural backdrop. That's what fires my imagination and makes me want to write, and what inspires me to ask people "are you SURE you want to know," because it's the equivalent for me of saying, "so, tell me about your character."
So, yeah. Come closer. Don't worry about that moaning noise, it's just the wind. Take this candle... it can be dark in here during these storms. Take a deep breath, count to three, and tell me about your Gothic. :)
So for today, then, I'm going to focus on that thing I love so much I'm kinda making a career out of it -- Gothic literature. Granted, there are many kinds of literature in the world, and I enjoy most of them in one form or another. It's not even my only concentration in lit -- I'm also specializing in Eighteenth-Century lit (which is by definition mostly British, although there are a few American novels right at the tail end -- Charles Brockden Brown, I'm looking at you). And while I do enjoy said 18th Century literature, primarily for the sheer wahoo of it all as well as the whole "wait, you mean I can make a living out of this" sense, as well as the sheer joyfulness with which authors played with this newfangled novel format, it's Gothic literature I'm writing about today.
Gothic literature is one of those things that's sort of difficult to pin down. On the one hand, we have the historical Gothic period of literature, which started about the mid 1700s with The Castle of Otranto (more or less reliably) and ran until about 1800, spawning countless novels much to everyone's surprise, delight, and horror at what kids these days were into. This "terrorist fiction" as it was called then was a return to the fantastic, not as an approved nationalist legend or foreign temptation, but as a means to deliberately make the reader feel by scaring the pants off him or her (pretty often her, but by no means exclusively). It was the progenitor of our modern horror genre, as well as our fantasy, sci-fi, and mystery genres. Romance... well, certainly in the sense of bodice rippers we have a clear line of descent. Realistic romances though were around well before. T'any rate, there you go. Novels with fantastic elements designed to make you feel and experience a catharsis as you studied clear representations of good and evil and felt the pathos and pity and revulsion that surrounded them, as a means of emotional moral instruction.
All that emotional furor is kind of exhausting, though, and by 1800 or so, the Gothic's kind of played out -- or is it? Northanger Abbey, Jane Austen's Gothic parody/homage/satirical commentary was written in 1803, though not published (and not for lack of trying) until after her death over a decade later. It had jumped the shark, to use the modern terminology. People were castled-out. It was an ex-genre. Sort of. The Romantics ran with what they'd loved about the Gothic, though, declaring that people could pry the sublime and their imaginative fiction/poetry from their cold, dead fingers, and not before. They kept the Gothic alive in their own Byronesque way, reinventing it and subverting it to meet their own needs. Frankenstein is proof of that.... the focus on the domestic, on the horror of the body, on inheritances and ambition and gender issues and the sublime played right into their hands. It laid more or less fallow for another thirty years until the mid-1800s, when we start seeing it come back in Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre and so forth. This nineteenth-century Gothic resurgence gave us most of the novels we think of as Gothic today, as well as archetypes that we still keep around and reinvent and use to scare ourselves with. The realist movement was again the death of Gothic for a while, but like any good horror monster, a little death never stands in its way for long. There were always adherents to keep it alive and kicking, if off in the shadows.
Now. Historical Gothic aside, those historical novels built up to a body of work, creating a genre that we also call "Gothic." It's this genre that still persists today, coming back over and over again. It's flexible if not fluid, allowing for a wide breadth of interpretation and variation while still making works that are recognizably "gothic." In essence, the gothic genre consists of a set of conventions (or as I prefer to call tropes, since there's more to them than what I feel conventions hold and they've passed on into movies and television as well). No gothic work needs to have every gothic trope present -- honestly, anything like that would be self-parodying -- the number and type of conventions have only increased with every reinvention it's gone through. The list or tropes is long and no two people seem to fully agree on what it contains; my personal list includes orphans, unattached young women who are somehow set apart (heiresses, scholars, virtuous virgins, etc), secrets, family lines, dopplegangers, houses you can't escape, property lines of inheritance, domestic/romantic relationships, body horror, sex, torture (physical and/or psychological), death, darkness, ghosts, unnatural life (which includes but is not limited to undeath), ruin and decay, exotic locations, dark brooding men, Patriarchy!, monsters, the supernatural (or just the appearance thereof), and so forth. There can also be a significant dominance/submission element at play in the relationships as well, as sexual tension and a little hint of danger and/or kink play large and looming in a lot of the gothic world.
This latter set of gothic, genre gothic, is the one that fascinates me. Sure, we like gothic lit/movies/tv/music because they're sexy, frankly. It's scary, it's a little dangerous, it's fun, and at the end we all go home and have ice cream. Heck, it's been around long enough that we barely even register things as "gothic" any more if there isn't a vampire in a big fuck-off cape or a dark castle that really needs a housekeeper. If it doesn't signpost in neon, we barely consider it. However, take a look at these titles: Gothika. Shutter Island. Twilight. House of Leaves. Evanescence. Game of Thrones. The Shining. Sucker Punch. Psycho. Silence of the Lambs. The Orphanage. Sherlock Holmes. That doesn't even get into things that proudly label themselves as gothic, honestly. Nor does it count things which borrow one or two of these aspects, but not a sufficient number of them for us to really consider them fully gothic, which also happens a lot. We are continually drawn to these tropes over and over again, whether we're conscious of it or not. They run rampant through our culture. For all the hokey aspects of chain-rattling ghosts and exotic transylvanian accents, there's something in these things that continues to draw us in to explore them, something in us that it feeds. These tropes are symbolic of other, deeper meanings, or else why would would they persist in the literary environment as long as they have, with no sign of aging out of the symbolic vocabulary? That's what I want to explore -- that's what draws me in and makes me want to study it and write about it and see what threads I can draw through the larger body of work, as seen against the contemporary cultural backdrop. That's what fires my imagination and makes me want to write, and what inspires me to ask people "are you SURE you want to know," because it's the equivalent for me of saying, "so, tell me about your character."
So, yeah. Come closer. Don't worry about that moaning noise, it's just the wind. Take this candle... it can be dark in here during these storms. Take a deep breath, count to three, and tell me about your Gothic. :)
