Suddenly a drive through cheerful plants has become threatening to the narrator’s safety.Īnalyse a Novel Part 2 Themes in Gothic literature They are also ‘powerful’, ‘monsters’ ‘blood-red’ and ‘slaughterous’. These were monsters, rearing to the sky, massed like a battalion, too beautiful I thought, too powerful they were not plants at all.’ĭu Maurier, Daphne, Rebecca, Little, Brown Book Group.Ĭan you see how the writer has used personification to bring the plants to life? Obviously, if they are just pretty red flowers they are in no way threatening to us personally, but here they have ‘faces’, they are ‘rearing’ and they form a ‘battalion’ i.e. They startled me with their crimson faces, massed one upon the other in incredible profusion, showing no leaf, no twig, nothing but the slaughterous red, luscious and fantastic. There was something bewildering, even shocking, about the suddenness of their discovery. ‘…on either side of us was a wall of the colour, blood-red, reaching far above our heads. Notice how the writer brings the plants alive to create a sense of menace. This is an extract from Rebecca, when the narrator is describing the drive up to the house. A tree, for example, is not very threatening when it is just a tree, but if it suddenly has malevolent human characteristics, it suddenly becomes a threat. See if the writer is using personification to bring alive inanimate objects and make them threatening. ‘patchily died’, ‘cracked’ and ‘weeds’ sets the scene of decay? The use of the simile ‘hung like tangled rat’s tail hair’ makes an unpleasant comparison, evoking disturbing imagery and, without any other information at all, we already know that things have gone wrong at this house.
Waters, Sarah, The Little Stranger, Little, Brown Book Group.Ĭan you see how the writer’s choice of language e.g. The steps leading up to the broad front door were cracked, with weeds growing lushly up through the seams.’ Ivy had spread, then patchily died, and hung like tangled rat’s-tail hair. Sections of the lovely weathered edgings seemed to have fallen completely away, so that the house’s uncertain Georgian outline was even more tentative than before. ‘What horrified me were the signs of decay. See how Waters uses language choices to warn us about the house within which the plot will play out. This is towards the beginning of the book, before anything scary has happened. Here is an extract from The Little Stranger. Consider the language they are using, see if they are employing metaphor or simile to make comparisons with horrible things. Pay attention to how the writer uses setting to create an atmosphere of trepidation, threat or decay. So the suspense and tension begin to build. We, the readers, know that if something awful happens (and in Gothic novels we can be sure that something awful will happen), the characters will struggle to get help. Help, we know, will be slow in arriving or may not come at all. The isolated house, the spooky castle, dense woods, a graveyard, or wild moorland have powerful associations with isolation, loneliness and being cut off from potential avenues of help and support.
The setting is always an important, if not crucial, element of a Gothic novel. Watch the trailer for The Little Stranger For example, Dracula or Wuthering Heights will probably be a challenge for many teenagers, but Du Maurier’s Rebecca, or Waters’ The Little Stranger, are much easier. Some of the choices are easier to read than others. Generally speaking, aspects of setting, theme, character and atmosphere are glaringly obvious in Gothic literature, whilst they may be much subtler and trickier to define in other genres. Gothic literature makes these essential GCSE, IGCSE, A level and IB requirements very easy to understand. This is because they will invariably be learning about setting, characterisation, themes and atmosphere whichever books they are studying. I would argue that even if your teenager does not have a Gothic novel or story to study for their exams, it is definitely worth encouraging them to read some Gothic literature. All these texts are either firmly in the Gothic genre or have powerful Gothic elements. This is far from a comprehensive list, but it is clear that Gothic prose features repeatedly on Literature papers. On various A-level syllabuses appear Dracula, Rebecca, Wuthering Heights, The Picture of Dorian Gray, The Little Stranger and The Bloody Chamber. It is a popular choice for schools, with well-known classics like Frankenstein or Jekyll and Hyde often chosen for GCSE or IGCSE. There are also a range of interesting but possibly less well-known options at this level, such as The Fall of the House of Usher and The Woman in Black. A quick look through the various GCSE, IGCSE, A level and IB English syllabuses reveals that the Gothic genre appears frequently.
Gothic literature authors how to#
Before we consider how to study Gothic literature, it is worth considering why it is important.
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