Conventions of Gothic

Literature,
A list, by RP with assistance from WMB

Gothic Characters:
• Helpless, victimised woman, virtuous, curious
• Femme fatale
• Useless hero – insipidity
• Comic characters, often working class
• Loyal servants
• Doppelgangers
• Narrator
• Dead parents
• No-one knows the whole truth

Gothic Villains can be

• Pure evil
• Strangely attractive
• Satanic (in the Miltonic sense)
• Anti-heroes
• Personifying a particular attribute

Techniques:
• Unreliable or multiple narrative voices
• Dramatic irony – only reader knows whole truth
• Verisimilitude – the found papers
• Framing devices
• Fakery – the artful forgery
• It’s always been about reviving something
• Many voices telling the story
• Unfinished story – the gothic fragment
• Heavily symbolic, very metaphorical writing

Gothic Settings
• Wild – sublime:
• Untamed nature – seas, mountains
• Pantheism – universal deity of Nature
• Evocative of the past – decay can be physical and / or moral
• Rural simplicity (cottages and hovels) – safe havens
• Liminal spaces – mental asylums
• Labyrinths
• Caves
• Locked spaces
• Underground
• Cities – Gotham city
 • Lawlessness
• The edges of the map
• Blurred boundaries

Motifs:
• Blood
• Bells
• Things suggesting secrecy
• Penetrations
• Death
• Corruption
• Seven deadly sins
• Encounters between life/death, past/present
• Night
• Pathetic fallacy
• Separation
• Usurpation
• Incest
• Danger
• Addiction
• Uncertainty
• Sanity/insanity
• Religious imagery
• Loneliness
• Guilt/hell as internal state
• Freaks
• Altered states
• TRANSGRESSION – the breaking and confirmation of boundaries
• Victimisation
• Modernity/atavism
• Monstrosity