Gothic?

Goth is a tired fashion statement referring to black clothing and black and white make-up (with a little red thrown in).  It is supposed to imitate the appearance of a vampire, or other creature of the night.  But where does Goth come from?

Gothic originally referred to the Goths, a Germanic tribe; it was first used to refer to anything “germanic” but later was used to refer to anything medieval.  “Gothic architecture refers to the medieval type of architecture that is characterized by the use of the pointed arch and vault.  The Gothic novel, or Gothic Romance, is a type of fiction that was inaugurated by Horace Walpole’s Castle of Otranto, A Gothic Story (1764).  Walpole’s subtitle refers to the novel’s medieval setting.  Because of its exotic setting and mysterious occurrences, Walpole’s novel was popular enough to result in a series of gothic novels—most of which were set in the medieval period and included gloomy castles replete with dungeons, subterranean passages, secret compartments, and sliding panels.  And helpless heroines needing to be rescued.  Quite often these novels made use of ghosts and other ghoulish figures, mysterious appearances and disappearances, and an assortment of supernatural occurrences (which only sometimes turned out to have natural explanations.  The aim of such novels was to evoke chilling terror by exploiting mystery, cruelty, and horror.  Most of these novels would seem rather melodramatic, sensational, and even quaint to readers today, but the best of them explored new ground in print culture: the irrational, the perverse, and the nightmarish terror that lies beneath the surface of ordinary life.  Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) and Gregory Lewis’s The Monk (1797) are two of the best gothic novels.

The term “gothic” came to be associated with any type of fiction that developed a brooding, mysterious atmosphere of gloom or terror or that represented uncanny, macabre, or melodramatically violent events.  Gothic also refers to any type of fiction that deals with aberrant psychological states.  Any type of fiction that involves the grotesque (bizarre distortions and abnormal depictions) and the fantastic (where the possible and impossible are confused) can be considered gothic.  Perhaps the best known of the early nineteenth century gothic novels is Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818).  Gothic fiction was particularly popular in early periodicals, and both Poe and Hawthorne wrote gothic tales to satisfy this imaginative desire for horror and suspense.  Ghost stories were particularly popular throughout the nineteenth century.  H.P. Lovecraft, who claimed Poe as his “god,” was one of the best writers of gothic horror in the early twentieth century, and both Clive Barker and Stephen King acknowledge Lovecraft’s influence on their fiction.  The line from The Castle of Otranto to Hellhouse (Barker), Salem’s Lot (King) and Interview with a Vampire (Rice) is direct and continuous.

Romance: a fictional story in verse or prose that relates improbable adventures of idealized characters in some remote or enchanted setting; or, more generally, a tendency in fiction opposite to that of realism.  The term now embraces many forms of fiction from the gothic novel and the popular escapist love story to the scientific romances of H. G. Wells, but it usually refers to the tales of King Arthur's knights written in the late Middle Ages. . . . Later prose romances differ from novels in their preference for allegory and psychological exploration rather than realistic social observation, especially in American works like Nathaniel Hawthorne's the Blithdale Romance (1852).