Logo of British Library.
Title — The Gothic.
A highly ornamented house with Gothic-influenced interior design.
Professor John Bowen, University of York, stands in stairwell in Horace Walpole's house.
PROFESSOR JOHN BOWEN:
Here we are in Horace Walpole's house, Strawberry Hill. This is the place where both the Gothic revival in architecture and Gothic fiction began. The whole thing is a fake or theatrical version in miniature of what a Gothic or medieval castle might be. But it's not just architecturally that this house is important, because it's also very important in literary terms.
Professor John Bowen stands in stairwell in Horace Walpole's house.
PROFESSOR JOHN BOWEN:
One night he's asleep in his bedroom upstairs and dreams of a gigantic armoured fist appearing on the staircase behind me.
Professor John Bowen's hand opens 'The Castle Of Otranto'.
PROFESSOR JOHN BOWEN:
And that inspires him to write The Castle Of Otranto. This is published in 1764 and begins this enormously powerful tradition that continues to the present day in hundreds of books, television programs and films.
Title pages of Ann Radcliff's 'The Mysteries Of Udolfo', Bram Stoker's 'Dracula'. Drawing of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.
Still from black-and-white film adaptation of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. Still from 'The Woman In Black'.
Text — Place and time.
PROFESSOR JOHN BOWEN:
Gothic fiction is fascinated by strange places — on the one hand, very wild and remote landscapes, and on the other, very imprisoning places.
Photograph of a tall ship surrounded by sea ice.
PROFESSOR JOHN BOWEN:
So, if you think of the end of Frankenstein, it's there on the wild Arctic wastes.
Film poster for Tod Browning's Dracula.
PROFESSOR JOHN BOWEN:
Or the other one is somewhere like Dracula where you get the imprisonment of poor Jonathan Harker who's a nice, modern young man, goes off to Central Europe and he suddenly captured by Count Dracula and imprisoned in this violently archaic world.
Professor John Bowen stands in doorway in Horace Walpole's house.
PROFESSOR JOHN BOWEN:
So, it's a sudden transformation both in the space that he's living in and the place that he goes to.
Footage from Carl Theodor Dreyer's Vampyr.
PROFESSOR JOHN BOWEN:
It's also, of course, a change in the kind of time that Dracula's living in. He moves from modern world — this is a world of typewriters, of recording equipment, of stenography, of modern trains — suddenly to a world that reaches back into the most archaic and distant sense of time. And that's very typical of all Gothic fiction.
Detailed drawing of a grotesque scene featuring a ghoulish, vampirish figure in a crowd.
PROFESSOR JOHN BOWEN:
It wants to see the relationship between the modern world and the past not as one of evolution or development but of sudden juxtaposition and often violent conflict in which the past erupts within the present and deranges it. And one of the most powerful motives of that is, of course, the ghost — the thing that you think is dead but comes back vividly alive in the present.
Coloured drawing of two men pointing at a ghostlike figure.
Text — Power.
PROFESSOR JOHN BOWEN:
So, at the heart of Gothic fiction is the question of power. On the one hand, it tends to drawn to very powerful — often supernaturally powerful or obscenely powerful figures, and on the other, to people who are completely vulnerable.
Footage from a film adaptation of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde showing Jekyll's transformation into Hyde.
PROFESSOR JOHN BOWEN:
It seems to want to do this, to explore the limits of what it is to be human, to be driven by either internal desires or forces outside yourself that make you or compel you to do things you don't want to do.
'The Nightmare' by Henry Fusili, showing a reclining woman in white with a ghoul crouched on her chest and a horse's head poking through red curtains.
PROFESSOR JOHN BOWEN:
And that, of course, gives it an enormous scope to explore the position, say, of women in 19th-century society or 18th-century society, the way that women often are forced into situations in which they are confronted by irrational kinds of desire or need to which they are vulnerable and which might make their very life at risk.
Professor John Bowen examining books on a shelf in a private library.
PROFESSOR JOHN BOWEN:
Gothic novels are full of perverse, weird and dangerous kinds of sexuality. It's often fascinated by incest, by same-sex desire, by violence, by abduction, by rape. So, Gothic is a kind of writing that can make explicit what is often held back within more normal kinds of writing. On the one hand, it's fascinated by total sexual power by these obscene patriarchal figures who seem to be able to have no restraints whatsoever on their desire.
Still from Tod Browning's Dracula showing Count Dracula creeping up on a sleeping woman.
PROFESSOR JOHN BOWEN:
But it's also constantly drawn to the figure of the vulnerable young woman, and her possible triumph over these apparently unbeatable forces.
Text — The uncanny.
PROFESSOR JOHN BOWEN:
One really term for thinking about Gothic writing is 'the uncanny'. Now, this is a term that comes from Sigmund Freud. So, it's something that's new but that also takes us back to something either in our own psychological past or something in the world that's archaic.
Still from Robin Hardy's The Wicker Man showing the constructed Wicker Man.
PROFESSOR JOHN BOWEN:
Often Gothic fictions drive onwards to these uncanny moments for the reader, in which you suddenly recognise somebody who seems unfamiliar and a strange, in fact, has an identity that you already know. So, figures that are not quite human — that look human but are not entirely human, like dolls, waxworks, automaton — these are very characteristics marks, not just of Gothic but particularly of the uncanny.
Text — The sublime.
PROFESSOR JOHN BOWEN:
In the mid-18th century, critics and writers become more and more fascinated by experiences that don't seem to fit within their normal category of what's beautiful and what's pleasurable. They get fascinated by, what's it mean to be in the middle of a storm at sea, or to see a shipwreck, or to be on the top of a high mountain in a great wind? And the word that they use more and more to describe this is 'the sublime'.
JMW Turner's 'Snow Storm — Steam Boat Off A Harbour's Mouth'.
PROFESSOR JOHN BOWEN:
The sublime isn't harmonious, balanced and beautiful, which had traditionally been the concern of the aesthetic, but is often terrifying and awesome and overwhelming. And Gothic is absolutely at the centre of that move to the sublime and sublimity in understanding the world.
Text — Crisis.
PROFESSOR JOHN BOWEN:
Gothic particularly tends to appear at moments of political and social crisis, so there's an enormous increase in the number of Gothic novels written in the 1790s. There's another burst at the end of the 19th century. So, at moments of great political change, particularly following the French Revolution in 1789, the Gothic seems a way of trying to master and understand these enormous changes. That's a religious crisis too — the Catholic Church is despoiled, its abbeys and its monasteries are closed. And that feeds into the Gothic sense of doubt about the supernatural.
Text — The supernatural and the real.
PROFESSOR JOHN BOWEN:
Gothic is fascinated by the supernatural.
Professor John Bowen's hand opens a copy of Mathew Lewis's 'The Monk'.
PROFESSOR JOHN BOWEN:
In Matthew Lewis's famous novel The Monk, Satan himself appears at the end of the book and the main character, Ambrosio, sells his soul to the devil. But there's also a very different kind of writing, like that of Ann Radcliffe — who's the other great Gothic novelist of the 1790s — where there is no supernatural.
Title page of Ann Radcliffe's 'The Mysteries Of Udolfo'.
PROFESSOR JOHN BOWEN:
There do appear to be ghosts, but, in fact, by the end of the novel, all those ghosts have been explained in a naturalistic way. So, there are two different kinds of Gothic — one that uses the supernatural, as it were, and expects us to believe in it, and the other that gives a natural or realistic explanation for it.
Text — Filmed at Strawberry Hill House.
Text — Directed by Anna Lobbenberg, Director of Photography Joseph Turp.
Text — With special thanks to Professor John Bowen.
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