Page 97 - DENG402_HISTORY_OF_ENGLISH_LITERATURE

History of English Literature

Notes “The Gothic parody survives into the 20th [and 21st centuries] by way of the related technique of
metafiction. Writers such as Jorge Luis Borges and Umberto Eco habitually deploy, self-consciously
and ironically, the narrative devices of the Gothic” (Roberts 271).
The English novel seems to have grown out of the grooves of conventional realism and didacticism.
The last years of the eighteenth century are often dubbed as the age of transition—transition from
the neoclassicism of the school of Pope to the romanticism of the early nineteenth century. In these
years we find a shift of emphasis in the novel too. Horace Walpole’s Castle of Otranto (1765) was
the first work of fiction which broke away completely from the traditions of the realistic and
didactic (and often, sentimental) novel and started the vogue of what is called “the Gothic romance”
or “the novel of terror.” Walpole and his followers created in their novels a blood-curdling and
hair-raising world of haunted castles, eerie ruins, macabre ghosts, harrowing spectacles of murder,
and a hundred other elements calculated to strike terror in the reader and to make him perspire all
over. Mostly, the “terror novelists” were crude sensationalists whose works were mere schoolboy
exercises devoid of any artistry. Most of them transported themselves to the medieval Europe
supposedly full of the spirit of chivalry, romance, and mystery. As most of them turned to the
middle Ages for their material, they are called “Gothic” novelists. Very few of these novelists
showed any appreciable knowledge of human psychology, perhaps because no such knowledge
was at all required for the kind of work they were up to. Most of them turned to the supernatural
to add to the atmosphere of awe and terror. All this goes to show that the terror novelists were of
the nature of crude and thrill-hungry romantics who came before the true efflorescence of
romanticism in the early years of the nineteenth century. But some of them like Horace Walpole
were in fact hard-boiled intellectuals who indulged in Gothic romance as an escape from the
oppressive boredom of the world of reality. Their medievalism was, thus, a sham, a mode of
escape. For the true romanticists like Coleridge and Keats the hazy and romance-bathed Europe of
the middle Ages was a real world: they lived and breathed in it; they did not escape into it, as they
were always there. But the terror novelists like Walpole were dilettantes and pseudo-medievalists
who did not believe a word of all that they wrote. Their world was a make-believe world created
just to kill a few idle hours which happened to be free from any intellectual activity.

Task Write a short note on Gothic Novel.

Horace Walpole (1717–97)

Horace Walpole was the pioneer of the Gothic novel in England. Just as Percy with his Reliques
and Macpherson with his Ossianic poems heralded the romantic movement in English poetry,
Horace Walpole with his novel The Castle of Otranto (1764) heralded the romantic movement in
English fiction. He reacted against the realism, didacticism, and sentimentalism of the followers of
Richardson and Fielding. He did not think higly of even Richardson and Fielding themselves.
After reading the fourth volume of Richardson’s novel Sir Charles Grandison he set it aside saying
:”I was so tired of sets of people getting together, and saying, ‘Pray, Miss, with whom are you in
love?’ His desire was to shake arid shock such niminy-priminv sentimentalism and to give a story
altogether chilling and thrilling. He said good-bye to his own age and chose for the scene of his
novel Italy of the twelfth or thirteenth century, full of the spirit of mystery, supernatural ism, and
crime. It is of interest to note that he was something of an antiquarian very much interested in the
art of the Middle Ages, particularly Gothic architecture. Ifor Evans in A Short History of English
Literature observes; “Walpole carried out the medieval cult more completely than most of his
contemporaries, and at Strawberry Hill he constructed a Gothic house, where he could dream
himself back into the days of chivalry and monastic life.” Horace Walpole was the son of Sir
Robert Walpole, the famous Prime Minister of England. He was a witness to the boredom of
higher political life, and his medievalism was perhaps an escape from this oppressive boredom.
The Castle of Otranto was first published in 1764 and was given out to be the English translation
of an old Italian manuscript. In the second edition, however, Walpole admitted that it was all his

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