Gothic Origins & Genre

The gothic often refers to the sinister or supernatural horror genre or the medieval style of architecture.

Gothic was derived as a sort of joke, Horace Walpole applied the world Gothic to the novel The Castle of Otranto which was published in 1764, this was the start of a form of literature that was seen as immoral or wrong, so the authors often did not own up to creating the stories that they wrote and often said that they were derived from foreign text. Gothic novels are known to have strong motifs within them and these include;

• Strange places - Gothic novels are often set in wild rogue landscapes, castles ect. They are set in castles & monasteries as these places are almost like labrynths, they also hint to aristocracy and the catholic religion. 
• Clashing time periods - Ghosts of the past haunting the present day, usually of the medieval era.
• Power and Constraints - The stories often have a strong contrast between power and vulnerability.
• Sexual Power - The novels are often perverse and weird and involve rape, incest and homosexuality.
• The Uncanny - Where new forms take you back to something in the past that you already know, these things are often not quite human.
• The sublime - Is something that is not usually seen as beautiful or normal it is sometimes terrifying and overwhelming.
• Crisis - Times of political change often feeds gothic, so crisis is usually shown in the literature. There was a lot of gothic literature around the time of the French revolution as this fed the literature of the time.
• Supernatural & Real - Uses supernatural and either makes us believe that the supernatural is real or explains the supernatural in a scientific way.

Victorian Motif's and Carmilla;
As a way to break down my understanding of the novel Carmilla I have started to think about how I can apply these Gothic motif's to the novel that I have read.

• Strange places - In the novel Carmilla it is set in a remote location in Styria amid an extensive forest and she lives alone with her father in a castle.
• Clashing time periods - The way I believe clashing time periods come into the book is when they find a portrait of the Countess Mircilla dated 1698, many years before the actual time the book is set in, so Mircilla is infact as old of the portrait as it is of her, so the time periods clash.
• Power and Constraints - The power in the novel is shown by Carmilla as she has a power over Laura, she is also seen as a large powerful cat like animal, this is contrasting to the vulnerable Laura who is unable to do anything about the power of Carmilla.
• Sexual Power - The book has strong lesbian undertones, and in the novel you can see Laura getting uncomfortable with the sexual advances of Carmilla.
• The Uncanny - Laura has a dream when she is younger that a strange woman comes into her bedchamber and caresses her whist she sleeps and ends up biting her, 12 years later when she see's Carmilla they both instantly recognise each other.
• The Sublime - Although Carmilla is seen as beautiful sometimes her advances can be terrifying and overwhelming to Laura, and being a lesbian was not the norm during the Victorian times.
• Crisis - The crisis that is seen in this novel is that all the young women from the surrounding villages are dropping dead from a strange unknown illnesses.
• Supernatural and Real - the way the supernatural is shown is at the end of the story where it turns out that Carmilla is a vampire and the novel explains that people can choose to become a vampire after death.

Mullan J. (Unknown). Discovering Literature: Romantics and Victorians.Available: http://www.bl.uk/romantics-and-victorians/articles/the-origins-of-the-gothic. Last accessed 9th Feb 2016.

Mullan J. (Unknown). Gothic Motifs. Available: http://www.bl.uk/romantics-and-victorians/articles/gothic-motifs. Last accessed 2nd Feb 2016.