Introduction to the concept of Gothic genre and Edgar Allan Poe [610651]

Chapter I
Introduction to the concept of Gothic genre and Edgar Allan Poe

Poe was born on January 19th, 1809 in Boston, Massachusetts. It is therefore the second
centenary of his birth, a fact that should not have more importance, but any excuse is good to
remember a figure as relevant as this very special author.
He served as poet, critic and editor. He is one of the greatest universal masters of the short
story, father of psychological terror, precursor of the detective story and of science fiction. It also
contributed to renew the Gothic novel, whose ways adapted to the Amer ican reality to approach it
to its public. It exerted an enormous influence in the literature of its time and in all the later,
influence that would cross borders arriving at the Victorian England. Numerous authors such as
Kafka, Lovecraft and the French s ymbolists, among many others, are debtors of his work and
admirers of his.
His parents were two modest actors of the east coast: David Poe and Elisabeth Arnold. At
an early age his brief life begins to suffer the hard coats that would make him an unhappy being.
He was abandoned by his father in 1810, when he was only nine months old. The misfortunes did
not end there, for he would lose a mother at two years of age. Throughout his life the obsession of
the image of his dead mother, in such a way that tormen ted this idea and came to form in the
belief that all beauty and goodness was destined to an early disappearance.
Upon his return to the United States he entered the University of Virginia, where he
excelled in the study of several languages. According to some biographers such as Hervey Allen,
his temperament played the first bad thing, because he led a dissipated life and had to leave the
studies to have problems with alcohol and laudanum, as well as for the accumulation of gambling
debts. According to ot her biographers the sequence was just reversed: his stepfather stopped
helping him economically so that he could not maintain his position in the University.
The crossing of accusations between the two letters was fierce: a young and rebellious
Poe left the University and wandered for a few years, living with different jobs. His personal
situation deteriorated more and more until he decided in 1827 to join the army. Although he tried
to rebuild his relations with his stepfather, he not only refused, but a lso hid the serious illness of
his French stepmother, whom he was very fond of. Poe would never see her alive again, and the

day after his funeral, the pain caused him to faint, sinking into melancholy. Perhaps it was the
grief so deep that John Allan noti ced in him that he did help him to graduate and to enter the
Military Academy of West Point, where he would be little time, enough to break again the
relations with his stepfather after the new Marriage of this, that definitively withdraws its
support, and to be licensed to the short time, apparently by insubordination.
Meanwhile he had spent some time in Boston, where he entered literary circles and
published his first work, Tamerlane and other poems (1827), which was ascribed to the romantic
movement and showed its pro -European vocation in poetry, Especially byroniana. This was not
going to be good for him, because in his native country he was received with some disdain, as a
stranger. He would be followed by a second job after leaving the army .
In the m id-thirties he settled in the city of Baltimore, where he began to practice as a
journalist. He would also begin his interest in short stories, a genre in which Poe would soon
become the undisputed master. After passing away his stepfather without leaving him an
inheritance, he married his cousin Virgina, aged thirteen , in 1836. During this fertile period he
directed several literary magazines and wrote in abundance, creating some of his best works,
exercising criticism and journalism. In spite of this appa rent calm, his fondness for alcohol and
debts created continuous problems: the income he obtained from his work and his sometimes
large works could not prevent his disordered life from making him and his woman. On the other
hand his obsessions and existent ial problems were aggravated over the years.
In 1840 he managed to publish an anthology of stories, although they had already
appeared previously in the newspapers: Tales of the grotesque and arabesque , 1839) contained
some of his best works, such as The fall of the House of Usher ( 1839) . Due to this publication and
to win several prizes, especially with the famous poem The Raven , 1845) reached the fame and
could realize a tour by the country reciting its poems.
In 1845 he would publish his own magazine, the Broadway Journal, although for a short
time: misfortune came to him again when he broke his publication in 1847 and died of
tuberculosis his wife, whom he loved madly. These events aggravated his psychological
problems and plunged him into depression, alcohol and drugs.
On October 3rd, 1849, Dr. James E. Snodgrass found him in a state of mental alienation in
front of a tavern in Baltimore, and dressed in clothes that were not his own. He was rushed to the
hospital, where he suffered from hallucinations that alternated with sporadic moments of lucidity

– it has often been said that he suffered a delirium tremens, but it is not known for sure. He died
after a few days, on October 7th. The causes of his death are not known exactly, but the symptoms
of his illness, described by Dr. Snodgrass, were compatible with rabies, which could have
inadvertently infected a cat or a dog. In any case it is known that he had suffered malaria a year
earlier, which left him in a precarious state of health, and that he was w eak of the heart. His last
words were ''May God help my poor soul ''.
In his poetic work, which begins with Tamerlane and other poems in 1827, but is
definitively consolidated with The crow and other poems in 1845, Poe succeeds in consecrating
himself as one of the greatest and most influential American poets. Until the arrival of Whitman
are the bases that he feels those that set the standard in the United States. In his work Poe
combines the lyrical elemen ts with a narrative discourse in which he shapes the intensity of his
psychological vision, within a broad thematic record in which the supernatural elements are not
lacking. This multiplicity allows the reader to establish a very personal relationship wit h Poe's
work, choosing what interpretation he prefers to stay with: from the literal to the allegorical, the
supernatural or the symbolic. In his poems, Poe is an advance of the symbolism that a few years
later appears in France – not in vain is in this co untry where the intensity and drama of his poetic
and proseist work is better understood. He is therefore a romantic poet, but begins to close the
stage of romanticism and open the way to new movements.
Despite the consistency of his work, and probably du e to the rupture he draws with the
above, he gets a cold welcome from the Anglo -Saxon critics. It will not be until many years after
his disappearance when, in distant France, authors such as Baudelaire and Valéry claim the
greatness of his work. It will b ecome not only a model, but also a perfect example of the damn
romantic poet.
Grotesque and arabesque were the terms with which Poe designated his own works,
especially the most gruesome and supernatural. They are a continuous exploration of human
psychol ogy, as well as a continual descent into the depths of horror. One of his most important
works is Tales of the grotesque and arabesque (1840) in which he compiled the materials that
appeared previously in various periodicals. It contains works suh as Ligei a, The tale -tale heart or
The Fall of the House of Usher , that is to say, some of the best stories ever written in English
language. Children heirs stories of the themes of the black novel, which is possible a
disadvantage, because for its readers, and for criticism, writer of the era of Poe too Europeanized,

that is, away from the tastes of his country.
In these stories the defects of the old Gothic novels have disappeared: the long and funky
novel has acquired the structure of a modern space, the dawn o f a greater psychological depth and
a virtuosity rarely seen in the device of elements, both linguistic and symbolic , the same
architectural setting is adapted by Poe to the liking of its readers, taking from the old European
castle to the spaces of the Am erican continent.
In this story the narrator is invited by an old and eccentric friend, Roderick Usher, who
had not seen for a long time his house Roderick lives with his twin sister Madeline, victim of a
mysterious cataleptic disease . Roderick himself, a ccording to the narrator, suffers from some kind
of nervous illness, to which the charged and terrible environment of the old house does not
contribute and which affects him to the extreme : ''Not without difficulty I was able to admit the
identity of the l anguid being before me with that of my childhood companion. Yet the character of
his face had always been extraordinary. The cadaverous complexion, the eyes large, liquid and
luminous beyond any comparison; The lips a little thin and very pale, but with an impossibly
beautiful curvature … And now, in the mere exaggeration of the predominant character of these
factions and of the expression they habitually communicated, there was such a great change that
I doubted the Person with whom he spoke. And then th e ghastly pallor of the skin and the
miraculous brightness of the eyes, above all else, astonished me and even infused me with
reverent awe''.
When the sister dies she is buried in a crypt in the basement of the mansion, while the
brother already skirts t he madness. Soon a terrible storm begins, in the middle of which appears
Madeline, who by mistake had been buried in life. Both brothers die victims of horror and the
narrator flees, terrified, as the mansion sinks behind him. An ending that is one of the most
terrible and famous scenes of fantastic literature: ''I fled in horror from that chamber, from that
mansion. The storm was still raging as I found myself crossing its old causeway. Suddenly a
strange light ran down the path and I turned to see from wh ere could come such an incredible
brightness, for the huge house and its shadows were left alone behind me. The glow came from
the full moon that was red as blood, and shone brightly through the crack, barely perceptible, as
I have described it, which exte nded in zig -zag from the roof of the house to its base . As he
watched the fissure widen, opening rapidly (…)''.
The work is baroque, distressing and interpretatively complex. It admits different

readings, some more supernatural than others. It is an ac count heir of the environments of the
English Gothic novel, but with a plot of greater psychological load and greater symbolic content.
Some of Poe's fantastic stories, which we might call grotesque -always according to the author's
sense of this term -are n evertheless more than the others. Some have called them metaphysical
accounts. The name is not unfortunate: they transcend the merely physical, but do not focus on a
supernatural subject or the use in Poe – read phantom or premature burial. They are storie s where
one perceives a fascination for the mysterious that reaches the highest summits of the numinous.
The unleashed force of nature, the mysteries of the cosmos, give rise to visions that alone
transmit the full force of the Mysterium Tremendum.
A good example of these stories would be one of the best stories of Poe – and one of the
best in all of universal literature – A Descent into the Maelstr öm (1841). The protagonist is a man
with the appearance of a crippled old man, but when he begins his story w e know that he is not as
old as he looks; It was the terrible experience he lived that left him in this state. Trapped off the
coast of Norway in a terrible sea swirl, the Maelström, the narrator tells of his experience, his
feelings of being faced with su ch a portent of nature, and how he managed to survive by tying
himself to an empty barrel, but at the cost of throwing himself with he to the crazed sea, while his
ship was sinking in an unfathomable abyss.
The European influence, especially of the Gothic novel, becomes visible in these stories
more than in the rest of the production of Poe. Recall for example The Pit and the Pendulum
(1842) typically Gothic story, whose action runs entirely in the most lugubrious dungeon during
the Toledo inquis ition.
Poe is the master of the short story, but he has also written a novel , The Narrative of
Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket , published by deliveries in the Southern Literary Messenger in
the year 1837. Although part of the base of A story of adventure , with an expedition in search of
the South Pole, the real motive of the work is to put into practice his theory of gratuitous art, that
is, the subordination of any other literary element. Literature is not in itself, there is no means to
achieve anything else. Poe 's visions are the service of language, and the plot is a symbolic, almost
surrealistic element whose sole purpose is to strengthen the semantic construction. It is not
surprising that many readers have believed that the work was incomplete, or mi ssing something
in this novel, when they judged its argument. It is not the argument that matters the language, the
symbols and the way in which everything is put into operation to create an atmosphere of

mystery and an aesthetic feeling.
The symbolism of the work is shown when towards the end produces an earthquake, and
on the surface of the earth open simas that reproduce the letters of the alphabet. The last lines of
the work seem a final truncated, and have been the reason for many interpretations : ''And then we
rushed into the arms of the waterfall, where an abyss opened to receive us. But here is a human
figure shrouded in our path, of much greater proportions than those of any inhabitant of the
earth. And the tint of the skin of the figure had the pe rfect whiteness of the snow ''.
In any case, the apparent nonsense of the end of the novel, or the fact of not knowing the
desti ny of the protagonist, rather than an inconvenience seems to have been a spur to other great
authors to rewrite the same story. So it is with Jules Verne, who wrote The Sphinx of the Ice
Fields taking as starting point the novel of Poe. So much would Howar d Philips Lovecraft do
with At the Mountains of Madness and Other Tales of Terror .
Although what has been said so far would already be enough to include Edgar Allan Poe
among the great writers of all time, it is by no means all that he was able to carry o ut. There are
some stories that are far from what we have been talking about: they do not have the symbolist
character, nor their justification is art for art. They are The Murders in the Rue Morgue (1841) ,
The Mystery of Marie Roget (1842) , The Purloined Letter (1844) , and also The Gold Bug (1843) .
These are stories that sometimes have something grotesque, but they do not give the supernatural
circumstances of the other works of the author, but an elegant and complex psychological game.
In this game the in tellect, through the inductive method, is used to solve some mysterious cases,
but at the same time the intellectual game is also an art form. Poe had invented the police genre
and with him the first great detective of this genre, Auguste Dupin, present in the first three
stories mentioned above.
In Dupin 's narrative, the narrator is also the friend of the investigator, a friend not very
skilled in these games of wit, so that the detective must explain all the steps of his work, until
arriving at the inevi table conclusion. It is a clear precursor of the figure, companion and confidant
at the same time, Dr. Watson, who gives the protagonist to show off and at the same time
facilitates the identification of the reader. Today the importance of Dupin may have d eclined a
bit, for the great success of later characters. However, he was the first and for a long time the
prestige of this character and his stories would serve as a beacon for other writers. Other key
features of the genre, such as the independent inves tigator, the crime in a closed place, the

multiplicity of suspects, are also the work of Poe, and although the subject is very interesting, it
escapes the purposes of this article, so we do not We will stop in your analysis.
As a collaborator and editor o f numerous magazines devoted to literature, Poe had the
opportunity to make his views known, both on literature and on criticism. In these subjects, his
work was also important, and although we will not stop to study it, it is necessary to mention how
the critical criterion of analyzing the works was imposed, only by the merits of these. Until then it
was common for critics to take much more into account the biography of the author, and even the
criteria of the critics, so that the appraisal of the work was often more influenced by the tastes and
preferences of the critic than by the literary value of the story. In addition to this greater
objectivity, Poe was also a declared enemy of the idea of inspiration. On the contrary, he believed
in the work, the p reparation and the refined use of all literary and semantic resources, with the
aim of achieving a predetermined end.
If the former was an attack on the supremacy of the critics of the time, the latter was
against the romantic myth of inspiration and the idle genius of artists. His theories regarding
these themes are found in many of his writings, the most important of which is undoubtedly The
Philosophy of Composition , 1845, where he details not only his thoughts, but also the method that
the he continued to compose his works, for this must not be forgotten, the genius of Poe 's work is
the result of planning and hard work, not of inspiration.
Poe's work did not enjoy editorial success during the life of its author. As an anecdote,
consider his first publi cation, Tamerlane and other poems (1827) Poe himself had to pay the
expenses of editing, and only 50 copies were seen, which were damaged. Of these, only 12 have
reached our days, and their present value is enormous. But the posthumous recognition little
consolation offers an author, especially if he suffered hardships of all kinds, as the case that
occupies us.
However, there is a book, and only one, signed by Poe that was reprinted in the life of the
author. The title of his greatest selling success will astonish most admirers of his work: The
conchologist's first book: a system of testaceous malacology, arranged expressly for the use of
schools, in which the animals, according to Cuvier, are given with the shells, a great number of
new species added, and the whole brought up, as accurately as possible, to the present condition
of the science – 1st edition, 1839, 2nd edition, 1840, 3rd edition, 1845 .
This is a cheap manual on shells, the genesis of which is due in large part to a friend of

Poe, Thomas Wya tt. He had published in 1838 an excellent book on shells, in full color, but sold
very little because of its high price. He thought of writing a cheaper black -and-white version, but
the publisher, of course, would have opposed it, since then the luxury edi tion would become
unsaleable. That's why he sought a subterfuge, obviously illegal, to get his way. For $50, in
return he put his name on the cover, drafted the preface and introduction, and translated the
mollusk descriptions of the great French naturali st Cuvier. He then shot much of the text of
Wyatt's luxury work, as well as another book on mollusk, The conchological writings of Captain
Thomas Brown. Today, this would be considered a brazen plagiarism, and even in his time Poe
was accused of this crime by some newspaper of Philadelphia.
However, according to the prestigious biologist and scientific disseminator Stephen Jay
Gould, Poe contributed considerable improvements in both his linguistic ability and his approach,
based on the criteria of the best French naturalists. Poe was not a provincial, but knew the main
streams of European knowledge. He succeeded in lending a manual that was largely plagiarized
and destined to be distributed among the most humble classes in North America -yes, there was a
market for such books: people modest but eager to acquire scientific knowledge .
The existence of a romantic movement in North America has been widely discussed.
Within the differences that present the literature in the United States of the time of the waterc olor,
we must also emphasize many elements a favor of the consideration that there was a romantic
movement. English Romanticism tended to fantasy and recovery, idealized, elements of the
feudal age. French, on the other hand, had a clear intellectual vocat ion, with certain revolutionary
elements. The Germans devote themselves with passion to the recovery of their folklore and the
creation, through culture, of a national reality. Romanticism in the United States had everything
that a series of problems: the legends own of its land were those of the Indians, whom they were
fighting. Their culture of origin was that of the colonial powers against which they fought, but it
is this struggle, along with the declaration of independence, that builds nationalism in t he United
States, the nationalism that is typical of the romantic movement.
The romantic tradition had therefore that all the above are distinguished, typical of a land
of settlers who in the place of recovering an idealized past preferred to focus on tho se who build
their future. This will provoke the first tension, that of those who are more of American roots and
who, on the contrary, have received a greater European influence. It is not surprising that among
the latter we find Irving, who traveled exten sively throughout Europe; Or a James, who would

have an entire stage of his literature dedicated to the subject of the cultural relationship between
the old and the new continent. Poe, for his part, is undoubtedly received many European
influences, but at the same time he was able to find a way of his own.
The European elements that can be found in the work of Poe, especially the gothic
element, have been perfectly assimilated and reelaborated. At the same time Poe was very
critical, sometimes contemptuou s, with the submission of American letters to European ones,
there is no such disgusting spectacle under the sun as our submission to British criticism. From
this desire for cultural independence regarding Europe arose partly because of its originality an d
the reworking of all the influences it had received.
It would be the genre of the Gothic novel first to arrive at America and it made of the
hand of Charles Brocken Brown (1771 -1810) that during the little time that dedicated to the
writing of works such as Wieland, or the Transformation .
The next, at least chronologically, would be Washington Irving (1783 -1859) who in the
exercise of diplomacy spent less than decades in Europe – is known for his stay in Spain, which
inspired his fam ous Tales of the Hammer (1832) And make him the first Hispanist in his country.
After him Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804 -1864) also a cultivator of the black novel, and one of those
who best adapted to the new territory the themes of that one. It was Hawthorne who transformed
the spaces of the European castle, its dark corridors and wet dungeons, into the old wooden
colonial house, a picture of the past in New England.
In short, Edgar Poe 's initial poetic vocation was somewhat frustrated. His works have no t
had great fortune and are remembered by very few of them. This contributed to his overly
mechanistic approach, which makes his poetry more finely tuned watch pieces than the
spontaneous expression of feelings. In the words of Eduardo Iáñez: Poe surpasses the romantic
conceptions and advances the lyric of the twentieth century by substituting intuition and emotion
for a rationality that is expressed literally through the symbol; nevertheless, unable to bring his
own ideas to the poetic realm, Poe is now re duced to a thinker, a great theoretical precursor of
contemporary lyricism. The problem of the poor survival of his poetry lies precisely in his
excessive theoretical burden: his obsessive themes – especially that of the symbiosis between
death and beauty – do not find in his lyrics a convincing expression, although an adequate
technique
Instead, as a narrator is an advance to his time, while a creator of novel literary materials

that will become new genres. He develops a great psychological insight that will be fundamental
to his appreciation by later readers, at the same time his analysis of terrifying situations is so
thorough, so deep, that he reaches the level of the symbol. In a way it is a spiritual literature, in
the sense of the search for the tra nscendent. What happens is that his spirituality does not seek
answers in religion but in pain, death, decay and beyond , ultimately in the supernatural. Poe is a
mystic who does not resort to divine revelation. He prefers to work as an explor er: he delves into
the human soul and from what he finds there traces poetic and narrative maps. His findings are
often terrible, but they are always poetic, especially in his narrative: he is more a poet in his
stories than in his poetry, because his stor ies of mystery and imagination make us feel the eternal
wilt of a world where everything is perishable. However, he is not an allegorical author; never
tries to moralize or teach the reader . Known were his pronouncements on the supremacy of the
imagination , his explicit condemnation of moral intention in the work of art and moral allegory ,
and so on and so forth, transferred social and moral conflict to the domain of aesthetics.
Extraordinary narratives are what is found in every writing by Allan Poe, one of the
greatest in the history of literature, poet, master of terror, writer of detective stories and short
stories of science and fiction. His death is surrounded by mystery, having a large number of
assumptions magnifying and paying tribute to those who knew how to capture in their writings
the terror and the approach to death as never before.
When written, an author describes not only the characters, places and elements of his
work, is also inherently described in every word that chooses to face death, with that necessary
violence that involves writing and detaching from his writing to give way To the endless readings
that over the years his work will have, because it is the readers who will recognize the sublime of
a text and the greatness of the author . In the case of Allan Poe, its transcendence is undeniable,
since its technique has been influence for other greats of the literature like Baudelaire, Borges
and Cortázar by its ability to develop the short story and the intensity that projects in each
history.
He is considered the father of the crime novel, for his analytical and mystery stories. The
figure of the writer, as well as his work, profoundly marked the literature of his country, in turn
exerted great influence in French literature and in pro moting the artistic and aesthetic generation
of a great variety of creative disciplines. The one of terror was a genre that it adopted to satisfy
the tastes of the public, its greatness comes mainly of its purely literary genius, but also of its

mastery in the definition of the states of mind, as well as the transitions between the same and
their Possible meanings and implications, all of which manages to frame it in perfect structures.
On the other hand, in his most macabre stories, elements of science fic tion appear, on the other
hand, his ability was not pigeonholed in a single genre, developing poems in prose, essays,
criticisms and satires, with the same quality and The short police and horror story.
Edgar Allan Poe and his so magical and detailed way of writing and describing the perfect
scenario for the development of a story, allows you to immerse yourself in the world of
imagination, in your reading, in the most sublime aroma of any place you invite to penetrate At
the very moment when you immerse y ourself in your world.
Allan Poe wrote about sixty stories, in addition to a series of poems, although this genre
did not dedicate the time he would have wanted, in addition to considering that the stories allow a
reading without critical interruptions an d therefore the unity of effects that is impossible In the
novel.
The scope of his influence in all literary fields is unmistakable, the police works and
stories of terror carried out by the fictitious, illuminated directly and decisively all the literatur e
of later generations, as well as the atmospheres of terror cre ated in each one of his stories, h aving
an impact not only in literature but in other arts such as cinema and theater. Where was the police
literature before Poe gave him the breath of life? W hat would be the stories of terror without the
influence of Allan Poe?
Charm and terror, the language of Edgar Allan Poe that ends up submerging you in the
most seductive atmospheres and emotions that come from the most uncertain stories of terror you
can imagine.
From the Latin gothicus, Gothic is an adjective that refers to that belonging to or relating
to the Goths. This was a town that was behind the eastern border of the Roman Empire and was
part of the group that the Romans called barbarians.
This word was coined by the writer of Florence, Vasari, who in a biography on Tuscan
painters included a section on the art of the Middle Ages. From then on, the term was used in a
pejorative way to refer to the architecture prior to the Renaissan ce, which was characterized by
disorderly and "unworthy" elements, in absolute contrast with classical architecture, endowed
with rationality and meaning. In architecture the Gothic had diverse names like opus francigenum
(French style) or Gothic final, as it was called in Spain to those constructions of Elizabethan or

Plateresque style.
At the moment the art developed in Europe between the XII century and the Renaissance
is known as Gothic. This artistic style has several similariti es with its predecessor (the
Romanesque), as the predominance of the religious and a timeless conception of works. In any
case, Gothic art proposed very luminous cathedrals, unlike the dark Romanesque churches.
The conception of Gothic, however, varied wit h the era. With the revitalization of the
medievalism that took place during the romantic period, the Gothic became associated with the
morbid and the sinister.
At present, there is a Gothic subculture that gained momentum from the late 1970s in the
UK and soon expanded throughout the world. Literature and horror films are its main influences,
which are reflected in the dress (linked to the Renaissance period), hairstyles, makeup and even
in the musical taste.
Gothic is a notion that is a ssociated with darkness or with dark music. Those who feel
identified with this movement are usually androgynous: men and women make up equally,
highlighting the pallor on the face and using black enamel on their nails. Black is also the favorite
color in the dress.
As far as literature is concerned, it is known as a Gothic narrative to the literary genre
where terror and darkness are intermingled. It is believed that the first novel of this genre was
"The Castle of Otranto" by Horace Walpole, first publish ed in the mid -eighteenth century. From
then on, there were many authors who joined this style making their contributions to the growth
of the genre.
It is important, however, to point out that today there are many variations within the terror
and that not all stories belong to the Gothic genre. There is, for example, a line that directs the
popular narrative and the tales of appearances that is rooted away from the bases of the Gothic
narrative.
That said, it should be added that the Gothic narrative is cha racterized mainly by an
exquisite description of the environments, using old terms and allowing to experience a sinister
and mysterious reading; Generally these novels own elements of the occult and the black arts.
Thus, although some specialists define th e Gothic novel as synonymous with black novel, among
them there are differences that can be arrived at from the reading and the real knowledge of each
genre.

In the romantic setting of the Gothic novel, the gloomy landscapes, the darkness, the ruins
of med ieval times, the basements and passages under the castles, the condemnations and the
torture are commonly present.
In addition the plot usually develops in an old monastery or castle, where the architectural
element is fundamental and collaborates with the enrichment of the plot. There is an atmosphere
of mystery and there is a prophecy that marks the coming of events in an almost supernatural
way. In addition the characters are driven by strong passions that lead them to commit acts they
do not even want a nd their moods are usually represented by the climatic changes of the
environment.
The Gothic novel emerged in the shadow of England of the Age of Enlightenment, when
the rejection of the supernatural in daily life, also translated into a strong condemnation of its
literary and aesthetic use. A number of writers (Horace Walpole, Clara Reeve or Sophia Lee, first
and later Ann Radcliffe, W. Ireland, William Beckford, MG Lewis or Ch. Maturin, who set their
generic conventions), however, Two other subgenres, whose birth we can consider parallel
(sentimental and historical), and in an act of rebellion, they set out on the adventure of writing
something new that would transgress the norms established by the aesthetic principles of the
prescripti ve classicist. Faced with reason they sought the irrational and, faced with the need to opt
for new sources of inspiration and new audiences, went to fear. In this endeavor, then, they
collected the inherited cultural baggage (and applied a good dose of fa ntastic elements to it.
And perhaps for that reason, from its origin the Gothic novel has maintained a close
relation with the denominated fantastic sort2. Much of the criticism (Todorov Caillois, Jackson
Siebres or Roas, among others) argues that, at the basis of this genre that "originated around
1800" (Jackson 1981: 79), we find undoubtedly Gothic literature and that The castle of Otranto
(1764) should be considered as the first literary manifestation of this fantastic genre. The problem
arises when esta blishing the true bond that exists between the two, because the point of view that
is part of sustaining this statement is indeed fantastic and does not take into account the wealth
and ambiguity that surround the Gothic novel Classic4. Where then to inclu de the Gothic mode?
Can we consider the fantastic as parallel to the Gothic? Can we circumscribe it to a small part of
that which is the fantastic? Or, on the contrary, would not be found, applying certain analysis, or
even encompassed in it? For this reas on, we propose a study that starts with Gothic fiction and,
from this, an analysis of the relations and points in common between both literary genres,

although always taking into account, as we will see, that the Gothic novel suffers from Certain
premises, more than necessary, essential, that prevent the complete identification with this
movement and that will justify our later theory.
Broadly speaking, we can affirm that this generalist reflection on the Gothic novel as the
beginning of the fantasy genre w as sustained and is still based on the fact that this would be the
first literary movement that became aware, in relation to the wonderful or fantastic elements of
the Idea of reality. Faced with wonderful literature (mythological narratives, novels of c hivalry or
miraculous stories) in which the transgressor element, which was seen as a miracle, was
immersed in a world parallel to ours and governed by its own rules, Gothic fiction experienced A
profound change that can only be explained by virtue of the century in which it develops. The
second half of the eighteenth century was characterized, under the philosophy of Neoclassicism
Illustrated, by the absolute reign of the laws of science and by a disproportionate cult of reason,
which would ultimately impo se rationalism as the only way of understanding And explanation of
man and the world (Roas, 2001: 24). The first consequence would not be expected: superstitions
and miracles were seen as a transgression of the explanatory paradigm of the real, which broug ht
with it, as we have seen, a rejection of the supernatural in everyday life and a deep censorship of
its use Aesthetic7. The new treatment of the supernatural demanded, according to these new
aesthetic principles, a distancing of the mechanisms of the ma rvelous that was based on the
respect to an objective reality.
The opening to reality had occurred, however, it was not enough that the world that
presented us with the novel was real, it was necessary a reality that respected the everyday of the
reader if the transgressor element sought to destabilize its limits and question the validity of its
rules . That is to say, a world perfectly recognizable so that the eruption in him of the
supernatural componte would give the desired effect. For this reason, fant astic literature, as
David Roas pointed out in his desire to "question our perception of the real" (Roas 2001: 24),
demands a world as close to reality as possible, becoming realism In a structural necessity in
every fantastic text "(Roas 2001: 24).
Now, i s it possible to find this fidelity to the reader's reality in Gothic novels? Or put
another way, do these fictions respect this structural requirement? And if not, how can we justify
it? What does it refer to? In the first place, we must start with the co nsideration of the reader of
the time in order to understand the true genesis of Gothic novels. Although superstitions and

miracles had been cornered by the precepts of reason, the supernatural still belonged to the
horizon of the reader's expectations; Gh osts, monsters and other phenomena and infested beings
remained latent in the collective memory as remnants of a distant and dark past. Gothic
storytellers, in their desire for experimentation with human terrors and the lack of direct reference
in their da ily world, saw in that past a perfect framework for the development of their plots. This
is what the creator of the genre justifies when he points out, in his preface to the first edition of
The Castle of Otranto, that events of this kind (refers to supern atural or strange events), as well as
the belief in all kinds of prodigies, Were deeply rooted in "those times of darkness" (Walpole
2007: 31), times, in which, it continues, there was a certain "miraculous" air.
In this type of Gothic narratives, therefor e, there was always a temporal remoteness with
respect to the facts narrated, which, at least, we can assert, conflicts with the necessary
"perception of the real" required by the fantastic story. The Gothic stories were always developed
in a past time, re mote and dark, being in most cases a medieval past that, in general, never
appeared precisely determined, which endowed these novels with a certain legendary aurea or
"miraculous "Said Horace Walpole. In the fantastic literature of our day, on the other ha nd, we
find only minimal alterations in the daily reality of the text, which is presented as perfectly
identifiable to the readers, who therefore experience the same feeling of uneasiness that the
characters, upon recognizing In the places and situations t hat are shown.
It is evident that the fantastic will always depend on what we consider as real and the real
derives directly from what we know (Roas 2004: 40 -41). Obviously this will mean that our
reality is not the same nor our beliefs coincide with those that lived and assumed as their own
readers of the eighteenth century. Nevertheless, although the testimonies of the time and the
genesis of the story suggest that the effect sought by the Gothic storytellers could have been
achieved, we can not but quest ion the extent to which the English public at the end of the
eighteenth century, in which The bases of the New Regime were already established, to
understand as near or familiar to their world these less legendary narratives, emplaced in times of
darkness, in Mediterranean environments, in times of the fearsome Inquisition. Everything must
have collected an irremediably archaic perfume that would automatically distract the recipient of
that ancestral universe, if not abnormal, at least difficult to identify as a replica of their everyday
world. That is to say, that remote time of the gothic novels in which the events unfold, distanced
from the one of the reader, made difficult the relation that was established between its own

experience and the world of the narration and tended to naturalize the supernatural, preventing
that it was obtained The sharp and necessary opposition between "the natural" and "the
supernatural" on which the fantastic effect is constructed, then that illusion of the real which
Barthes calls the effect of reality (1970), 10 then disappears; The receiver does not recognize or
recognize itself in that space .
This lack of equivalence between the reality (the real world that presents us, the medieval
past) and that of the reader (eighteenth or nineteenth century) is also translated at the discursive
level in a loss of verisimilitude that we will call contextual. The maintenance of verisimilitude11
was one of the first concerns of the fantastic; In need of a real world, needed to assert its ow n
existence, its own truth. The fantastic story must then strive to manifest to each passage that
verisimilitude, 12 offering to the recipient the elements to be accepted as verifiable, "because
reality, being an incontrovertible fact, can afford to be imp lausible, but the fantastic text ,
Intrinsically weak, as far as the reality represented is concerned, has the necessity of constantly
proving it "(Campra 2001: 174). Hence, the continued insistence of its authors on respect for it.
However, in the Gothic novel, contextual verisimilitude fails, thanks not only to the spacing of
the space -time coordinates of the text with respect to those of the reader – which produces a gap
between the (time of) the world (extradiegetic) alluded to by the narrator And that of its
subsequent reading – but also by the lack of an accurate spatial location. The reference to specific
places, historical events, real names or detailed descriptions of characters or environments is too
tenuous to be able to maintain this verisimilitu de, questioning, in this way, the procedure of the
Gothic novel in function of the structure of the fantastic story.
We should then consider that the verisimilitude intrinsic to Gothic fiction, far from the
fantastic text, is achieved not by the reader's i dentification with everyday reality but by the
sensation of reality that the author intends to offer the reader by presenting the reality of the
character, far Of the recognition of spatiotemporal coordinates. Small Rodriguez (1995: 134)
considers that, un derstood in this way, the verisimilitude of the Gothic narratives would not be
given by the daily reality as much by the relation that maintains this with the author and with the
text13.
Closely analyzed, the internal verisimilitude of the text defended by Rodríguez Pequeño
and Pozuelo Yvancos, demands, for the case of the Gothic novel and in its connection with the
fantastic, certain precisions that, again, distance it from the classic procedure of fantastic

literature . In the Gothic story, in front of th e pure fantasy, 14 in which it is not the transgression
that must be tried to be credible, but the rest of the text, the narrators try to submit to the
verisimilitude to the supernatural fact and, in that attempt, the Which end s up losing it is the
whole text15. Indeed, the textual credibility of Gothic novels, because of this procedure, hangs on
a thread many times, because the line that separates the credible from the incredible remains
always diffuse, thanks above all to the forced explanations of the fantastic events , Imposed by
the logic of the Enlightenment, to which the novels of sentimental, or rational, feminine Gothic
appeal recur. In the fantastic story, on the contrary, the final sequence reveals, not the facts per
se, as to the nature of these, and does not provide an exhaustive explanation, but rather reveals
some light. As a consequence, at the moment when supernatural events are justified in the Gothic
novel, one loses not only the longed for effect of the fantast ic, but also the "conventional
naturalness of the organization of narrative contents" (Campra 2001: 176). That is to say, the
rules of causality, which in a motivated way organize our world and which must therefore
organize the text, are broken. When confr onted with the Gothic story, any reader, whether
contemporary to the work or current, is predisposed, based on psychological, social and cultural
conventions, to issue a judgment of verisimilitude before the real events, on the one hand, and
before the fan tastic fact , for another. However, the fading of the latter into totally absurd and
incomprehensible reasonings, which do not enter into our mental schemas to use, breaks, as it did
with the contextual, with what we will call textual verisimilitude19 (exp lained by Julia
Kristeva20 ), Thus distancing itself from the classical behavior of fantastic literature.
The loss of textual verisimilitude also implies in its process the sacrifice of the
transgressor element and, although it is true that the effect of t he supernatural is kept alive
throughout the story until its final outcome, fantastic literature is the only genre, As David Roas
(2001: 8) points out, which can not function without the presence of the supernatural, 21
understanding as supernatural, as we know, what transgresses the laws that organize the real
world. Thus, the mysteries of Udolfo or Mazzini (Ann Radcliffe) or the medieval castle of Sir
Philip, protagonist of the novel of Clara Reeve, The Campion of Virtue, A Gothic Story, like so
many othe r castles and palaces that appear in the Novels by Charlotte Smith, Regina Maria
Roche, Anna Laetitia Aikin Barbauld, Ann Fuller, Charlotte Dacre or TJ Horsley -Curties or
Sarah Green, in front of what narrator and characters pretend to believe in nothing r esemble the
supernatural or fantastic; No ghost is hidden behind noises, crunches, voices of the beyond or

strange apparitions. All seemingly supernatural facts are passed through the filter of reason by an
exhaustive, rational and realistic explanation, 2 2 but implausible and contrary to the general
causality of the text, so that nothing is left to the imagination of the reader, a fundamental effect,
as It is said, that they must experience the fantastic narratives (López Santos, 2009). And what
was create d with the pretense of being "inexplicable" ("can not be explained") ends up becoming
"unexplained" ("can be explained"), a procedure that brings the Gothic narrative closer to the
classic police novel than to Traditional fantastic narration23.
It is true, on the other hand, that this textual verisimilitude is respected in a faction of the
Gothic novel, which criticism has called precisely supernatural or male polo and to which we
prefer to refer, under a unified criterion, with the appellation O f irrational. In contrast to the
previous one characterized by a marked rationalism, irrationality breaks in the text through the
element transgressor that is not justified by not needing any logical explanation, understood as a
unit that breaks with the e stablished order. In this way, the transgressor element does not need
subjection to the verisimilitude and the whole of the text, therefore, does not sacrifice it. In The
Castle of Otranto and in The Monk of Lewis the giant helmet or the ghost that persecu tes Ramon
de las Cisternas24 are understood as elements alien to the daily life of the characters that are
accepted as a process of transgression of reality.
This double tendency only responds to the debate that originated between the respect and
the attac k on the prevailing enlightened precepts and which materialized in the conflict between
rationalism and irrationality, two opposing poles whose literary struggle managed to capture in
their Pages, more than any other movement, the Gothic novel. And althoug h it is true that a
separation could be established within the fiction that distinguishes between what we have called
a rational gothic novel and an irrational Gothic novel, it does not seem too operative to confront
them in an attempt to link the latter t o the fantasy genre, That the supernatural element, from this
point of view, although important for the development of the plot and for the maintenance of the
narrative logic, is always accessory and appears subordinate to the true essence of the Gothic
novel, which is none other than fear , The game that, beyond the transgression, the author
establishes with protagonist and reader based on rummaging in the terrors that cross our
consciences and our daily nightmares and that these accede to take departure. That is,
supernatural elements do not constitute the same raison d'être of the narrative work, but instead
become part and parcel of the service of terrifying architecture. And when the transgression of

reality disappears or happens to occupy a secondary p lace, as is the case, by another function
(Roas 2004: 44), that in the Gothic novel would be the effect of fear, the sensation of the sublime,
the story Ends up losing his fantastic consideration.
In this way, if the intention of any fantastic text is to a rouse in the reader a certain anxiety
or anguish at the possibility that the unreal may break out in the everyday world26, what
characterizes every Gothic novel is fear, superimposed on the rest of elements Which compose
and structure it, "which must alway s appear and be present in every passage of history"
(Lovecraft 1984: 11). In fact psychology, as Delemeau confirms, clearly distinguishes between
fear and anguish, the two basic manifestations of the feeling of threat in the human being: "Fear,
dread, dre ad, terror belong rather to fear; Restlessness, anxiety, melancholy, rather to anguish.
The first leads to the known; The second to the unknown. Fear has a specific object that can be
dealt with. Anguish does not have it, and it is lived as a painful waiti ng before a danger that is
even more frightening because it is not clearly identified: it is a global feeling of insecurity. That
is why it is more difficult to bear than fear "(Delemeau 1989: 31).
The last sensation, the restlessness, is achieved in fanta stic literature with the inevitable
irruption of the supernatural component, compared to the first that has in the Gothic novel
numerous resources for its production. Gothic fiction, in its final pretension, resorted to the whole
repertoire of elements kno wn to represent the horrible, the bloody, the painful and the result was
a literature made of atmosphere, irrespirable atmosphere: dark spaces, sublime landscapes,
horrible and overwhelming descriptions , Macabre scenes, 29 because, rather than transgress or
problematize our conception of the real, its main objective to provoke terror was to argue about
the taboo subjects, those that had to do with desires annulled by religion, those who were
repressed by the light of The Enlightenment, or simply those who did not fit into the mental
schematics of the use of the neoclassical reader (human malice, hidden desires, sexual
perversions, contact with the beyond, extensively developed in Lewis and Maturin's novels).
Terror is then, more than an option, a demand in the Gothic novel. The whole story is
destined to generate this terrifying effect: macabre elements, horrendous crimes, sublime
architecture, – elements, as we have seen previously, that belonged to the horizon of the reader's
expectations (Roas 2003: 10). And narratives are built around this sensation, because as
Rodriguez Small (195: 137) asks, "Could there be the Gothic genre if the reader did not
experience fear when reading the works belonging to him?" The sensation of terror – More or less

intense – is the requirement that must be fulfilled, above any other, every novel inserted in this
genre.
However, the excessive use of identical mechanisms to arouse fear in the reader, who
knew how to take advantage of Gothic storytellers with relative ease, would, paradoxically,
become a formula, and thus fail to impress, to provoke Amazement and dread in the reader, it
would have to evolve, through the fantastic story, opening the way to experimentation with new
components that, in rummaging in the most daily fears , provoke more unrest than real terror. To
the wear and tear of the old formula, we must also add the change of vision of reality. The
superstitions, the ghosts of the inquisition, and the important weight of the Catholic religion had
remained far behind. This new vision of the world revealed not only the old order but also the
abundant remnants of those ancient beliefs; Superstitions, were not enough to frighten a new
credulous reader, because, after all, the man of the new millennium only feels anguish at what he
does not understand and that he escapes the logical disposition of his everyday world.
For this reason, fantastic literature, based on historical -cultural co -ordinates and
conventions of the moment, sought in its evolution, from the dark eighteent h century to our
twenty -first century, the transgression of the notion of existing reality, abandoning terror in favor
of Feeling of restlessness. This is confirmed by the thesis of David Roas (2002: 44), who argues
that the evolution of the fantasy genre – from its distant origins in the English Gothic novel of the
eighteenth century – has been characterized by a progressive and relentless search for new ways
of communicating To the reader the repertoire of fears that are part of his horizon of expectation s
from the initial terror to the current unrest34.
In short, terror is often related to the fantastic but it is not an indispensable condition35
(Todorov 1982: 47); Fear and the fantastic can coincide, manifest simultaneously, but not
necessarily, never in a relationship of dependence, because neither the fantastic36 causes fear,
nor fear produces the fantastic37.
This implies that the fear or the restlessness will happen to be subordinated, for the case
of the fantastic story and against what happens in th e gothic fiction, to the transgression of the
reality, reason why if the gothic requires the fear not so fantastic38 . This theory leads Rodríguez
Pequeño (1995: 142) to state categorically that "horror literature (and in our case the Gothic) is
only one o f the various genres of fantastic literature", the one that basically experiences With the
feeling of fear.

Still considering the value of his study, after the arguments set forth, we can only
conclude, in opposition to Rodríguez Pequeño's last statement, defending the theory of Gothic
fiction as a genre origin, but independent of the fantastic39. The Gothic novel, starting from the
marvelous and legendary and based on the struggle between the pre -eminence of irrationalism or
the persistence in reason, was configured as a mother genre capable of splitting itself into
renewed literary genres with structures already perfectly fixed and delimited, thanks to the
Richness of its problematic and, at the same time (and derived from it), to the scarce consistency
of its mechanisms.
Indeed, when the strict subjection to enlightened reason was met with the cultivation of
scientism, the police genre was born, just as the absolute triumph of irrationalism in later
literature would entail the definitive explosion of the f antastic genre, The great master Edgar
Allan Poe, who knew from his formation in Gothic fiction to give life to these two new literary
genres that would surpass that one in public, in vitality and in literary quality42. For this reason,
if the traditional fantastic literature coincides to a great extent with the Gothic, it is because, on
the one hand, it inherited from it certain mechanisms43 that, over time and in accordance with the
logical evolution experienced by the genre44, were relegated to a Second, in search of their own
autonomy: terror, sublime architecture or perceptible transgressor element (ghost, vampire,
monster); And because, on the other, it reproduces the Gothic theme adapting it to the new tastes
and although some reasons remain, its sign ification evolves. That is, between the Gothic and the
fantastic, as Maurice Lévy (1980: 41 -48) recalls, "there is continuity, but not total and absolute
identity." And we can not continue to confuse the genres (fantastic and gothic), otherwise we
would fa ll into continuous base errors.
To attach the Gothic genre, therefore, to fantastic literature would mean denying it part of
its richness and complexity, its essence, ultimately and why not, its legacy to the history of
literature.