Introduction: Tracing the Modern Gothic

Summary

And yet, unless my senses deceive me, the old centuries had, and have, powers of their own which mere ‘modernity’ cannot kill.

—Bram Stoker, Dracula

The unknown world is, in truth, about us everywhere […]; the thinnest veil separates us from it, the door in the wall of the next street communicates with it.

—Arthur Machen, The London Adventure

Since its birth in the mid-eighteenth century, Gothic literature has always been paradoxically yet inextricably entwined with modernity and the Enlightenment. Its emergence coincides with the development or acceleration of dramatic cultural, social, economic, and political changes, and it has continued to evolve in parallel with modernity’s inexorable expansion. This interrelation has been extensively studied, although critics disagree regarding its nature: Julia Briggs sees the Gothic as ‘part of a wider reaction against the rationalism and growing secularization of the Enlightenment’; Jerrold E. Hogle argues that ‘the Gothic, despite its apparent countering of the modern, is deeply bound up with the contradictions basic to modern existence’; while Daniel Darvay goes so far as to suggest ‘a redefinition of the genre not as mere symptom or antagonist but rather as guardian of modernity’. The founding novels of the Gothic mode, such as Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto (1764) and Ann Radcliffe's The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), are explorations of terror, mystery, and the supernatural which must be understood within the context of a world growing increasingly confident that such phenomena can be challenged or banished. The Gothic novel is fascinated by these affects and ideas precisely because they confront the assumption that modern scientific rationalism and secularism have granted humanity complete power over, and understanding of, the world. The present study takes this fundamental entwinement of the Gothic and the modern as its founding premise, and focuses upon a specific phase of British modernity, from the late nineteenth century to the outbreak of the Second World War, which also broadly overlaps with the era of literary modernism. In parallel with the seismic historical developments of this period, I will argue, we see the continuing proliferation and mutation of Gothic themes and aesthetics to form an increasingly complex and fragmented mode of representation within British literature.