试论爱伦•坡的哥特式风格以《厄舍古屋的倒塌》为例(4)
3. Gothicism
“Gothic” originally refers to one of the Germanic tribes living in northern Europe. Then it becomes a pronoun of people who are savage. Gradually it gets related with religions in that it represents a style of architect —the so-called the Gothic building. The Gothic fiction is a kind of novel with romance, mystery and terror. It officially became a name of novel genre and entered the literature field in the middle and late of eighteen century. It is The Castle of Otranto with its subtitle “A Gothic Story” written by the English writer Horace Walpole in 1764 that marks the official beginning of the Gothic literature.
3.1 Definition of the “Gothic”
“Gothic” comes from the word “Goth”, which indicates one of several Germanic tribes that was “instrumental in the fall of the Roman Empire” (Punter, 1996:13) in medieval times. Archaeologists ever confirmed that they settled in the Baltic at early time and then gradually moved to the Black Sea. In the third century, the Goths were proved to start their invasion of Roman territory. In 410 A.D., they took Rome under the rule of King Alaric and afterwards established kingdoms in France and Italy. So, this tribe of the Goths has left upon people a deep impression of truculence and barbarian. At times it is used for scaring children.
With the fall of Rome, people knew little about the medieval world during the Renaissance until this period is included into “Dark Ages”, and then “Gothic” “became a term applied to all things medieval” (Punter, 1996:13). In Dr Johnson's dictionary, “Goth” is defined as one not civilized, one deficient, in general knowledge, a barbarian" and the medieval of "Gothic" age as a cultural wasteland, primitive and superstitious (Punter, 1996:14).
Afterwards, the term was first used in an aesthetic sense. Gothic originally refers to a style of architecture popular in Western Europe form the twelfth to sixteenth century, while the Gothic also refers to the religious architecture that thinkers in the Renaissance dislike. Until today, this kind of architecture can be mainly seen in the church, and in the castle or everywhere in Europe and the United States. Its typical characteristics are long and narrow corridors, dark-tint panes and somber castles always with basements for corpses and so on. Later on, the Gothic architecture is widely spread in non religious buildings (Li, 1995:102). The meaning of the Gothic has began to spread gradually with new meanings given to it, such as savageness, terrors, backwardness, mysteries, dark age, the medieval and so on. The Gothic enters the literature field in the eighteenth century, being the name of a new style of novels.
From the perspective: a literary sense, the Gothic can be possibly regarded as a historical phenomenon which originates in the late eighteenth century. Gothic literature is seen as an access to expressing oppressive fears in textual form. It is made up of many subgenres: the ghost story, the horror story and the “techno-Gothic”. All their differences might be of equal importance to their similarities though these have clear associations with the “original” Gothic. The Gothic has been a quietly popular field in academic study since 1970s. Many books have been published, referring to both the Gothic in general or particular subgenres and to writers.
3.2 Traditional Gothicism in English Literature
With The Castle of Otranto achieving great success and being popular, Gothic novels witnessed a climax from 1920s to 1990s. A large number of writers emulated this new writing style and created a series of far-reaching Gothic masterpieces. The Gothic novel was also called literary works in the Black Romanticism, which reached its peak in the late of the eighteenth century and the early of nineteenth century when the Romantic literature became the mainstream literature in Britain. “Of Gothic taste is advocating but is a symptom of ideological giant change, it eventually evolved into the Romantic Movement.”(Devendra, 1987:12) This trend of Romanticism has had a great influence and quickly swept the literary world. Afterwards, there emerged a large number of famous Gothic fictions around the world, such as: The Mysteries of Udolpho by Ann Radcliffe, The Monk by Mathew G Lewis, Frankenstein by Mary Shelly and, of course, Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque by Edgar Allan Poe and so on.(Li, 2006:9)
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