Emily’s Cathy and Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre are both examples of female protagonists in such a role. The Brontës’ fiction is seen by some feminist critics as a prime example of Female Gothic, exploring woman’s entrapment within the domestic space along with the subjection to patriarchal authority and the desperate and dangerous attempts to escape from such restrictions.
Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1847) transports the Gothic to the bleak and alien Yorkshire Moors and features ghostly apparitions and a dark, cruel Byronic hero in the person of the demonic Heathcliff. The influence of Byronic Romanticism evident in Poe is also apparent in the work of the Brontë sisters. The influence of Ann Radcliffe can be detected in Poe’s ‘The Oval Portrait’ (1842), which also includes an honorary mention of her name in the text of the story. The legendary villainy of the Spanish Inquisition which was explored in The Pit and the Pendulum (1842) was based on a true account of a survivor. His story The Fall of the House of Usher (1839) explores these ‘terrors of the soul’ while revisiting classic Gothic tropes of aristocratic decay, death, and madness. He believed that terror was a legitimate literary subject. There were still old decaying houses and barren landscapes, but it was the tortured souls who inhabited these environments that interested Poe. Poe focused less on the traditional ingredients of gothic stories and more on the psychology of his characters, who often descended into madness. One of the great interpreters of the genre was Edgar Allan Poe (1809 -1849) who took the basic elements of the form and fashioned them in his own style. In many ways, it was now entering its most creative phase in the sense that it grew more fanciful and horrific.
Unsettling Dark Pleasures – Part Two The conclusion of David Stuart Davies’ short history of Gothic fiction Part Two: The Victorian Era & Beyondĭuring the Victorian era, the Gothic influence was at its most pervasive.
0 kommentar(er)
