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Words Have Power is the home of true book nerds. Applying literary theory to popular books from the last few years, we introduce avid readers to critical analysis and theoretical application skills, thinking more deeply about the books that are popular right now. Each season we examine a new area of theory, starting with an introduction to the contemporary Gothic. Ghosts! Vampires! Capitalism? Join Dr Vicky Brewster for fun, accessible podcast lectures!
Welcome to the Words Have Power podcast, season 1, introduction to contemporary Gothic. Hello, and welcome to Words Have Power. I'm your host, doctor Vicky Brewster. This season, we're focusing on an introduction to the contemporary gothic, and this first episode is very much an introduction to the introduction. We will be looking at what the Gothic means, even if you think you don't know what it means, then taking a jaunt through Gothic's history to finally land on how to interpret the gothic in the current moment.
Vicky Brewster:How do we know it when we see it, and why do we see it so often? So without further ado, let's get into it. So even if you know absolutely nothing about the literary gothic, if you've never heard of gothic books, if you've never heard of gothic theory, if you've been living under a rock, chances are you have still heard of the gothic, and there are 3 areas in which you are likely to have heard about that. The first is Gothic architecture. So Gothic architecture is really easily noticeable just from kind of taking a glance at it.
Vicky Brewster:It features what Britannica describes as cavernous spaces with walls filled with tracery. So on the inside, we have these kind of vaulted ceilings. We have massive architecture, especially for the time period. So for original Gothic, you're looking at kind of 12th to 16th century. So true medieval and early modern.
Vicky Brewster:And then on the outside of Gothic architecture, you are gonna be finding finials. You're gonna be finding tracery in the walls, in the windows. You're gonna be finding detail absolutely everywhere. And it's this fussiness that kind of sticks with Gothic as it's rediscovered in later periods. So when a lot of us think of Gothic architecture, what we're thinking of is neo gothic.
Vicky Brewster:So neo gothic appeared largely during the Victorian period, and it's still going on, but was very, very strong in in the 19th century. And it looks back to this architecture. So we're seeing similar kinds of spaces. We're seeing these vaulted ceilings. We're seeing the little turrets and gargoyles and fussy, fussy architecture.
Vicky Brewster:But it's looking backwards, and it's trying to pass itself off as something from an older age. So one identifies the Gothic in architecture through the aesthetic. You might not necessarily be able to tell when something that you identify as Gothic was built, but you recognize that it is Gothic. I want you to remember this aspect of the looking back. So the Victorian looking back to the medieval, and as we come into contemporary gothic, the contemporary moment looking back to the Victorian and to the medieval.
Vicky Brewster:So there's this constant kind of looking to the past and looking to what has happened before to pick up traces of that, to pick up elements of it, either to pass it off as something older than it is or to utilize signs that people will recognize in order to tell a new message. Another place where you are likely to have heard of the Gothic is goth subcultures. Depending on how old you are, this might look different. So the original counterculture of goth, which is short for gothic, started around specific music scenes in the early 19 eighties. So we're thinking Susie and the Banshees, we're thinking The Cure, joy division, that kind of thing.
Vicky Brewster:And there was a particular aesthetic associated with fans of that kind of music. Although it was originally based around music, it became recognizable from a strong aesthetic. So when we think of eighties goths, we think of kind of long unkempt hair, black clothing, pale skin, lots and lots and lots of black eyeliner. We're maybe thinking about doing interesting things with gender, gender bending a little bit for the first time. So again, it's something that you can recognize very easily.
Vicky Brewster:This has changed as we've moved into each generation. I am an elder millennial. I definitely thought of myself as a goth as a teenager. I didn't like The Cure. I liked Green Day.
Vicky Brewster:So I think a lot of original goths would describe that as emo rather than goth, but I had the very dark red hair. I would not have looked good with black hair. Lots of black eye shadow, black clothes, my placebo hoodie was an absolute necessity. And in each generation since the 19 eighties, goth has kind of been reimagined. For me, goth will always be the 4 kids from South Park who are the goth kids.
Vicky Brewster:That that is just goth for me. Again, some people will probably argue emo, but I'll argue the toss with that. And we do still see an element of the gothic today. I'm sure that Gen z have their own goths, and they have their own idea of what being gothism, that it it hasn't gone anywhere. And associated with this kind of goth countercultural subculture is an element of tribalism.
Vicky Brewster:So we have the goth clothing and the goth hair, and even the goth music tastes as a kind of uniform that a particular subset of people wear in order to recognize each other or in order to reject each other. This is again where we have the 19 eighties goths versus the early 2 thousands goths, so you're not goth enough and so on and so forth. But whatever generation a person is from, anyone, I'm gonna say anyone outside of that culture can definitely point to it and say, oh, that is a goth. People within the counterculture probably are a little bit more, that is not sufficiently goth. But there is this emphasis on the aesthetic that again is going to be very important when we move on to thinking about what is Gothic in the current moment and how do we identify it.
Vicky Brewster:And so the 3rd place where you might have heard of the Gothic is Gothic literature, which is what we are going to be all about on this first season of the podcast. So the most likely one that you are going to know is Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey. This is the one that has received TV adaptations that you might have studied at school. So Jane Austen is riffing on the work of Anne Radcliffe. Radcliffe.
Vicky Brewster:Anne Radcliffe is mentioned in Northanger Abbey, but she is a a real author. She was a very prolific author. She put out a lot of different, books, and she's incredibly well known, particularly within the gothic academic community. So Gothic literature, as we tend to think of it, begins in the 18th century with Horace Walpole's Castle of Otranto, But Gothic now is probably best known for the Victorian authors who were writing in the Gothic mode, so particularly Bram Stoker and Dracula, and Penny Dreadfuls, that kind of thing. It's what we like to look back to now in the contemporary gothic with, shows like Penny Dreadful.
Vicky Brewster:So if we were to think of gothic works now that feel classically gothic, we might think of something like Crimson Peak, which is a film by Guillermo del Toro. And this film harks back to the Victorian aesthetics. So there are a lot of waifelike pale young women in flowing white night gowns in an enormous decrepit house, wandering around at night with a candelabra. That is kind of classic gothic to my eye, to my eyes. But this itself harks back.
Vicky Brewster:So we have a film in the contemporary moment in the 2000 looking back to Victorian society, but it's a Victorian society that is using medieval aesthetics. So there is this kind of repeating echo of looking backwards. Want to learn even more about applying the theory to our primary texts? Subscribe now for access to more learning materials digging into the specifics of the text to help build your critical analysis skills. Head to substack.comforward/atwordshavepower or patreon.comforward/wordshavepowerpodcast.
Vicky Brewster:So what have we learned so far? The gothic relies on its looks. We can recognize something gothic without having to think about it because it has amazing branding. And by this, I mean I mean, there are so many different tropes or looks or moods that I could bring up that the gothic uses way. If you saw that in a film or read it in a book, you would instantly say, oh, that's Gothic.
Vicky Brewster:And that's what I mean by amazing branding. The other thing we've learned is that the Gothic constantly looks backwards. So whether it's to the medieval, to the Victorian, or to other Gothic works, the Gothic is obsessed with the past, and it's not just obsessed with the past as it exists. It's it's obsessed with its own past, so previous Gothic works. In this respect, the Gothic is self referential.
Vicky Brewster:And here I'm going to start throwing some theory at you. So there is a theorist called John Reader who writes mostly about defining genre in science fiction, but what he has to say about that classes really well for other genres and particularly, I think, for the gothic. So he says, studying the beginnings of a genre is not at all of finding its points of origin, but rather of observing an accretion of repetitions, echoes, imitations, illusions, identifications, and distinctions that testifies to an emerging sense of a conventional web of resemblances. So we've got a lot of long words there. Get used to that, but we will start unpacking it.
Vicky Brewster:So what reader is saying is that when you're trying to find the beginning of a genre, it's really, really difficult. It's so hard to pinpoint one text. So where he's talking about science fiction, the one text is often Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. And as I mentioned a little earlier in the podcast, quite often, the origin of the Gothic is Castle of Otranto. What reader is saying is that you can't define the beginnings of a genre in one text.
Vicky Brewster:In order to have a genre, you need to have different texts that you compare to each other. One text is not a genre make. You can't have a genre until you're able to see repetitions of tropes of aesthetics, until you see authors working off of each other in order to produce something new out of something old. So what I've said about the gothic being self obsessed, having amazing branding, these are aspects of a genre that make it really strong. And this is why, as a layperson, as someone who knows nothing about genre or about academic theory, it's still really easy to see I don't know.
Vicky Brewster:I've got a notebook in front of me that is purple with a bat on it and is covered in little tiny bats. That's gothic. And you know it's gothic. It doesn't matter that it's a little notebook. It wouldn't matter if I had never read any gothic theory.
Vicky Brewster:I would still be able to identify that because I know that purple and bats are gothic. So what exactly is being repeated in order for us to be able to identify gothic? I've mentioned a couple of tropes that to me really stand out to begin with. And if you were here with me, if we were doing this live, I might ask you to give me a list of identifiers that you associate with the Gothic. And, you know, absolutely feel free to pause the podcast, have a think about it, jot down some notes if if you are in the mood to do so.
Vicky Brewster:But I mean, you're not here. So I'm gonna list some of the things that make me really think of gothic. So black and red backgrounds, Specific monsters. So, zombies kind of, but oh my Specific monsters. So zombies kind of, but oh my goodness.
Vicky Brewster:Vampires, ghosts, so gothic. Dark and stormy nights, flickering candlelight, overbearing men and vulnerable women, seeking out the forbidden and being punished for it. These are all things that I really closely associate with gothic and that I would kind of expect to see in something that claims to be gothic. But how do these separate images add up to make a genre? What you might notice from the list that I just gave of images and tropes that I associate with the gothic, and have a think whether this also applies to what you yourself think if you've written down some notes.
Vicky Brewster:What links them together is a sense of dread. We're often placed on the shoulder of someone vulnerable, and we have more information than them because we see the gothic tropes. So, so often in the gothic, you'll find a heroine, it's almost always a heroine, who puts herself in a terrible situation, who has gone into something blind. And constantly, as the reader is the viewer in the back of your mind, you know that something terrible is going to happen because you recognize all of these tropes. So what is happening there is a disconnect between the main character and the reader where the main character is going into something innocently and unknowingly, and the reader constantly has this sense of dread because we know more than they do.
Vicky Brewster:Another figure that we often find also in Gothic is an inevitable transgression, and I use the word inevitable very purposely here. Again, this comes back to us, the reader, knowing more than them, the character. We see this sense of inevitability. Things are going to go wrong. That's the reason for the story.
Vicky Brewster:So with this transgression often comes a punishment for the transgression. Really amazing example here is Bluebeard. So if you're not familiar with Bluebeard, it is a fairy tale that we will probably go into more detail on a on a future episode. The idea is that you have a young woman who has married this ugly old man who has a blue beard. They go back to Bluebeard's castle, and Bluebeard says, oh, damn.
Vicky Brewster:I have to go away. You can go to any room in my castle except for this one room here. Here is the key for it, but promise me you won't go into it. So Bluebeard goes away. And of course the young wife has to give into curiosity.
Vicky Brewster:There is that inevitable transgression. That's basically invited by Bluebeard, even though he tells her not to do it. And when she goes into the chamber, she discovers all of Bluebeard's dead previous wives and knows that she will become one of them. So we have the inevitable transgression, and then the punishment for it is the young wife's subsequent murder, inevitable joining of the ranks of the dead subsequent murder, inevitable joining of the ranks of the dead wives. Another thing about Gothic is it provides a safe way to explore taboo.
Vicky Brewster:The gothic is very, very frequently associated with proper gross stuff. We're thinking incest. We're thinking cannibalism. We're thinking murder, and so on and so forth. It's a sensational way for a reader to vicariously live through these taboos, knowing that it's the character that will be punished and not us.
Vicky Brewster:So who is the Gothic for? Historically, Gothic has always been a women's mode of writing and reading. Why is this? Well, women for a long time have been associated with novels anyway. If we think about Jane Austen and a lot of the publicity around Jane Austen and a lot of Jane Austen's detractors, we think about, oh, no, women like trashy novels and men like important books.
Vicky Brewster:And we can bring this right forward into the present if we think about Twilight. Particularly in this day and age, it's become we hate whatever teenage girls like. Whatever teenage girls like is trash and is rubbish. And twilight is a perfect example of that. But twilight is inherently gothic, so we we're still seeing this happening.
Vicky Brewster:Beyond thinking of it as a women's mode of writing and reading, there are two strands of thought on who the gothic is for, both of which are summed up by theorists Baldic and Mick Hall. So firstly, a quick introduction to Baldic and Mick Hall. They are super important in terms of defining the gothic and and pointing out its legitimacy within scholarship in 2015. So Baltic and Mick Hall have identified 2 kind of contradictory audiences for the gothic. Firstly, they assert that the Gothic is for the middle class bourgeoisie to experience and express anxieties about the time in which texts are written.
Vicky Brewster:This is often associated to more highbrow Gothic. So if we're thinking about the things that are put on GCSE English literature syllabuses now. That's the kind of stuff that is this middle class concern. So we're looking at Dracula. We're looking at heart of darkness, all of that kind of stuff.
Vicky Brewster:But they also assert that the Gothic is a voice for proletariat revolution, or it provides a means by which the common people can revel in transgression. So in this kind of text, we're thinking of the penny dreadfuls. We're thinking of sensationalist fictions. We're going back to that sense of experiencing taboo without actually having to do anything terrible. So we have these 2 opposing ideas of gothic as something slightly highbrow.
Vicky Brewster:I mean, it's middle class. It's not upper class. So we're we're talking slightly high brow and expressing anxieties of the time and of the middle classes. So concerns about, oh, god, what, what we would probably now call the kind of a woolly liberal elite. That's the level that we're looking at.
Vicky Brewster:And on the other hand, we have the uneducated masses who just want to read something terrible happening. And maybe then we come back to Twilight. But that those are the those are the 2 competing ideas of what who gothic is for. So to come back into this idea of gothic anxiety, I'm gonna digress briefly because Baldic and Mick Hall, while they're saying this is what gothic has been perceived as, they also contradict battle. They push for gothic to be thought of differently.
Vicky Brewster:And in that essay, they particularly encourage Gothic scholars to move away from relying on the doubtful assumption that Gothic writing indexes to supposedly wide spread and deeply felt fears which troubled the middle classes. So they want people to think more widely about the Gothic and not just to try and map. Dracula is about immigration, and therefore, middle class people are worried about immigration, and they're worried about the purity of whiteness. And think about things a little more broadly and maybe a little bit more obliquely. This is something that we're gonna be returning to later in the series as we start to think about what our contemporary texts do differently to gothic writing up to the 20th century.
Vicky Brewster:So we're going to be thinking about what anxieties are now, whether these map to the Gothic, or whether it's helpful to make those connections or not. So this brings us quite neatly into thinking about gothic scholarship. One of the things that surprised me most when I started studying contemporary gothic is how new it is as a legitimate field, and I'm using this word legitimate quite purposely. So what I mean when I say legitimate is something that publishers want to publish about, something that people are happy to fund research for, that they're happy to stump up money to make a conference. Things are studied, and the gothic has been studied for a long, long, long, long time.
Vicky Brewster:But Baldic and Mick Hall's essay from 2015 critic critiques gothic theory and cites it as being established and widely researched from about the 19 nineties. So when you think about the length of history behind gothic literature, that's a really long time in which it hasn't been a legitimate field of study. So the very fact that we're talking about this and that it has become so popular and that it is appearing so much in the kind of literature that we want to put in front of teenagers, for example, is a very, very new thing. But you can also see from the span from 1990 to 2015, how long it's taken for a theorist within this new legitimate theory to really start to critique the way that Gothic is being studied and lay down a set of proposals for how to take Gothic forward as this legitimate study. Up to this point, there were obviously essays, and there were people writing about it and talking about it.
Vicky Brewster:So we can see that this is a new collection, a new companion to the gothic that is laying down new things about what we want this genre and what we want this area of research to be about. And it really is one of the chapters that you see cited again and again when you start looking into Gothic theory. I'm not sure what the inception of the Gothic as a legitimate. And again, notice I'm using this word both consciously and ironically However, the However, the prevalence of Gothic in the literary canon now can't be denied. From Frankenstein appearing on the GCSE syllabus to the popularity of Gothic studies in higher education, and even the number of scholarly texts and series dedicated to the Gothic in the last couple of years, we can see that Gothic is enjoying a boom in the current moment.
Vicky Brewster:And this is one of the things that I want to identify with this podcast series is why now? Why is this so popular now? So where is Gothic now? That brings us nicely to today, to this podcast series, and to the text I plan to cover in detail, thinking about contemporary Gothic. In this series, we're going to mostly focus on popular books from the last 10 years.
Vicky Brewster:So everything that we're covering is now out in paperback. You can get it from libraries, from audiobooks, probably from secondhand stores. Everything is popular. Everything has been widely published and should be really, really easy to get a hold of. A lot of them, you might even have already read if you're already an avid reader or a fan of the Gothic.
Vicky Brewster:So rather than try to cover 200 plus years of literature in this podcast, We'll be looking for the gothic markers that we've already started to talk about in the fiction from now, and then trace back their origins. So we are still going to be focusing on this Gothic, tendency to look backwards, but we're going to be starting from the point of now and then seeing what we can trace beyond or link up to prior Gothic works. In particular, we will examine how the aesthetic of Gothic has changed, if it's changed at all, and how Gothic plays with its own tropes and self references to create something new or repeat something old. So in this episode, we have learned a bit about Gothic origins. I know it's been a real whistle stop tour, and there are definitely places that you can go back to, including this amazing essay by Baldic and Mick Hall to find out more about gothic's origins.
Vicky Brewster:But we should also know by now that even if you've never studied Gothic before in any kind of detail, you can still recognize the Gothic. You still inherently know what gothic is somehow. We learned that gothic is both old and new, and has recently increased in both popularity and legitimacy, whatever legitimacy might mean. We identified that while the Gothic does a number of things relating to inevitability and transgression, the markers of Gothic change as time goes on. So there are some things that will have stayed the same, and there are some things that writers are doing that are new.
Vicky Brewster:And you always have to do something fresh with old tropes. So we're going to be digging a little deeper into into what those new things are. We'll be focusing on the way Gothic looks back and the way it reinvents itself for the current moment. And this brings us neatly to our next episode, which is recycling, adaptation, and aesthetic. In this episode, we will be examining Edgar Allan Poe's short story, The Fall of the House of Usher, and T Kingfisher's recent adaptation of that short story, what moves the dead.
Vicky Brewster:These are a really interesting couple of texts, and I highly recommend reading them before you come to the podcast. I'm gonna be giving a little advert shortly on where you can get hold of these books, but you should be able to get hold of them widely as I've said. If you've enjoyed this episode of Words Have Power, why not join our Substack or Patreon? As well as supporting the podcast and enabling us to pay cool guests to come on the show, You can also gain access to bonus content, longer episodes, and a discount code to buy the bundle of books we're discussing this season from Bert's Books. Not heard of Bert's Books?
Vicky Brewster:They are an amazing independent online bookseller. Plus, they have a shop in Swindon, if you happen to live close to there. They're partnering with the podcast and have provided a special discount code for if you buy the entire bundle of books that we'll be examining on this season of Words Have Power. To gain access to that code, come join us on Substack or Patreon. You can find us on patreon@patreon.comforward/ words have power podcast, or you can join us on our subscription substack@wordshavepower.substack.com.
Vicky Brewster:You can also support Words Have Power by subscribing wherever you listen to your podcasts, leaving us a review, and telling all your friends about us. Follow us on social media at vproofreader on Twitter. That's it for now. Hopefully, there will be, more social media in future. Thanks a lot for listening, and we'll see you next time.