The Fall of the House of Usher

Because the term “Gothic” is used in different cultural and historical contexts, before discussing the literary application of the term, some distinctions should be made. Gothic architecture, outside of any literary context, was so named by Renaissance critics who deemed the style poorly constructed, showy and vulgar, an allusion to the “barbaric” Goths who destroyed the Roman Empire. At the time, castles, cathedrals, and other buildings that were supposed to symbolize power and inspire awe were built in the Gothic style. These critics believed that the ornate style abhorred reason and linearity; most Gothic structural elements, unlike those of Romanesque or Italianate styles, are curved rather than straight. Elements of Gothic architecture often meet at oblique rather than right angles. The elaborate stained-glass windows, the dizzying heights of the interiors, the complex stylization, and effusive statuary were seen as corrupting and flamboyant, inducements to excess. To its detractors, the Gothic castle (or any other building) evoked structural, aesthetic, and moral degeneracy.

The first literary use of the term “Gothic” was in the subtitle of Horace Walpole’s novel The Castle of Otranto: A Gothic Story (1764). Walpole’s inspiration was Edmund Burke’s 1757 treatise, A Philosophical Inquiry into the Nature of the Sublime and Beautiful. Burke compares beauty, which arises from symmetry and harmony, with the sublime, which arises from vastness and grandeur and tests the limits of human perception.

While beauty inspires love and comfort, the sublime inspires excitement and fear. We fear the sublime in the same way we fear God: “Burke uses the phrase ‘delightful horror’ to describe the ‘truest test of the sublime.’ Delight for Burke is the removal of pain. When we realise that horror portrayed in the arts is fictional, this allows us to experience pleasure” (British Library, https://www.bl.uk/collection-items/burkes-a-philosophical-enquiry-into-the-origin-of-our-ideas-of-the-sublime-and-beautiful). Burke also discusses “the attraction of the grotesque, the terrible and the uncontrollable, a stark contrast to the prevailing 18th-century preferences for the controlled and balanced” (British Library). These features of vastness, grotesqueness, and disorder echo the criticisms leveled against Gothic architecture, but rather than being corruptive forces, Burke sees them as the very gateways to our experience of sublime pleasure. Crucially, as Burke notes, this experience is best elicited by experiencing horror in literature. The experience of relief and pleasure come from the reader’s ability to confront and survive extreme danger in a fictional context.

Burke’s essay and Walpole’s novel were wildly popular in their time. Unlike other literary fads that fell out of favor, Gothic literature has persisted as a genre, even as elements have been added and transformed. Walpole solidified the association between terror and the sublime in literature with the grotesque and sublime features inherent in Gothic architecture. This association would continue in Gothic literature, primarily through the work of Anne Radcliffe and Mary Shelley. Radcliffe adds to the genre the key features of romance and exotic, unusual locales, so that not only the house evokes terror and the unknown, but the novel’s entire setting transports the characters and reader out of their known world.

During the Victorian era, Gothic literature—more commonly referred to as Gothic horror—provided an alternative to the more critically lauded historical romances of Sir Walter Scott and the social realism of writers like Charles Dickens. As in the 18th-century, Gothic horror was a subversive space that both challenged and reinforced Victorian-era morals, especially those pertaining to women’s sexuality, as seen in the character of Madeline Usher.