The Gothic Genre :: Literature

Throughout the late ordinal century, and now into the twenty-first, critics have expressed growing anxiety about the sly boundaries of the Gothic genre. (Rintoul 701)The capacity of the Gothic to survive, and particularly to interbreed with other fantastic modes so as to engender much to a greater extent complex and blue-chip literary phenomena than itself, was extraordinary. (Moynahan 110)Overview of the Gothic NovelThe Gothic novel is said to brandish in disrupted, oppressed, or undeveloped societies, to give a voice to the uneffective and unenfranchised and therefore often carries a heavily political or metapolitical burden (Moynahan 111). For this reason, particular groups of writers, such as women (Ellis 48) and Anglo-Irish people (Moynahan 111), were often associated with the genre. While the kind between Anglo-Irish writers and their usage of Gothic conventions may be related to the physical composition of the genre of the national tale, it may be less clear wherefor e and how women employed the genre. Although it is uncertain whether women actually did participate in reading more Gothic novels than men did the Gothic romance in particular has extensive been associated with women. The other major genre associated with women at the time -- the novel of sensibility -- may actually be understood by some scholars as being in conflict with the genre of the Gothic. Patricia Meyer Spacks, for instance, insinuates that the relationship between sublimity and sensibility presents real complications...and while Gothic novels typically attempt sublimity, they rely heavily on sensibility instead (198-199). As sites of contradiction and contentment in this regard, and with the great longing of female Gothic writers, it is unsurprising that the genre became the site of a devout and, at times, bitter debate about the nature and politics of femininity (Ellis 48).The Children of the Abbey as a Gothic NovelI would like to suggest that the Gothic romance is a way of reinscribing the basic Pamela situation, in which a young lady is cut off from the controlling and protecting act of her parents, is flagellumened (in life, limb, and virtue) by a villain partly by cracking fortune and partly by the skillful use of her own primal resources, the young lady is ultimately able to overcome and surmount the threat and is rewarded by being married to a young man of heartfelt family, wealth, and ethical standing.