Chapter 3: Section B topic study: modern Gothic

Essential reading

John Fowles (1963) The Collector. (London: Vintage, 1998)
[ISBN 9780099743712].

Iris Murdoch (1963) The Unicorn. (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1987)
[ISBN 9780140024760].

Please note that new paperback editions of modern novels like these frequently appear. You may use any edition that you find convenient.

Recommended secondary reading

On modern Gothic

Not a great deal has been published on modern Gothic specifically (though there is masses on ‘traditional’ Gothic). The only full-length text on the topic is:

Sage, Victor Modern Gothic: A Reader. (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996) [ISBN 9780719042072].

Two essays are recommended:

Moore-Gilbert, Bart ‘The Return of the Repressed: Gothic and the 1960s novel’ in Moore-Gilbert, Bart and John Seed (eds) Cultural Revolution?: The Challenge of the Arts in the 1960s. (London: Routledge, 1992) [ISBN 9780415078252] pp.181–200.

Stevenson, Randall ‘Contemporary Gothic’ in his The British Novel Since the Thirties: An Introduction. (London: Batsford, 1986) [ISBN 9780713446647] pp.184–89.

On Fowles

This selection covers texts with useful material on The Collector.

Conradi, Peter John Fowles. (London: Macmillan, 1982) [ISBN 9780333328460].

Kane, Richard Iris Murdoch, Muriel Spark and John Fowles: Didactic Demons in Modern Fiction. (London: Farleigh Dickinson University Press, 1988) [ISBN 9780838633243].

Loveday, Simon The Romances of John Fowles. (London: Macmillan, 1988) [ISBN 9780333444825].

On Murdoch

This selection covers texts with useful material on The Unicorn.

Byatt, A.S. (1970) Degrees of Freedom: The Novels of Iris Murdoch. (London: Vintage, 1994) [ISBN 9780099302247].

Dipple, Elizabeth Iris Murdoch: Work for the Spirit. (London: Methuen, 1982) [ISBN 9780416312904].

Gerstenberger, Donna Iris Murdoch. (London: Associated Universities Press, 2001, originally published 1975) [ISBN 9780838777312].

Kane, Richard Iris Murdoch, Muriel Spark and John Fowles: Didactic Demons in Modern Fiction. (London: Associated Universities Press, 1988)
[ISBN 9780838633243].

Scholes, Robert Fabulation and Metafiction. (London: University of Chicago Press, 1967) [ISBN 9780252007040].

Introduction

The aim of this chapter is to introduce you to one of the most widely used genres in contemporary Western novel writing and to consider larger questions such as: what is a genre? and how and why do genres change and develop in literary history?

The history of Gothic

To illustrate one Section B topic study, we shall be offering a genre study of modern Gothic. Gothic has, of course, had a long and controversial history since its emergence in the mid-eighteenth century with texts such as Walpole’s Castle of Otranto and Beckford’s Vathek. It flourished in the Romantic period (approximately 1780–1830) in the hands of writers like Anne Radcliffe, M.G. Lewis, Charles Maturin and Mary Shelley.

Activity

The early phase of Gothic is covered in two other subject guides: it would be a great advantage to you to consult them to get a more detailed historical sense of the genre and its characteristic themes and conventions. They are the Personal study programme and the Romanticism units. It would be even more advantageous if you could read one or two examples of Gothic from earlier periods. If time is pressing, select short texts (some Romantic Gothic fictions, in particular, are extremely long).

Gothic continued to provide an inspiration to Victorian fiction, too, where it resurfaces in writers as diverse as Charlotte Brontë, Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins. Towards the end of the nineteenth century it experienced something of a revival in works like R.L. Stevenson’s Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray and Bram Stoker’s Dracula. It was also exploited by Modernist writers like Henry James, whose The Turn of the Screw is widely considered to be a classic of the genre, and Joseph Conrad. Conrad’s The Secret Sharer and Heart of Darkness both have substantial Gothic elements. Virginia Woolf, moreover, wrote sympathetically about it as a genre in which women writers had been prominent and particularly adept.

Activity

In addition to these early works, women are also very prominent in the contemporary revival of Gothic. You might want to think about why they have been so attracted to the genre throughout its history.

Gothic never entirely died out as a resource for serious writers in the period 1900–1960, as some of the work of Evelyn Waugh and Mervyn Peake, especially, suggests. However it certainly fell into critical disfavour, as is indicated by the work of the Leavises, two of the most important literary critics in the period 1930–1960. In Fiction and the Reading Public (1932), Q.D. Leavis railed against its ‘clumsy call for tears, pity, shudders and so forth’ and was strongly critical of writers like Charlotte Brontë and Dickens, who were most interested in its possibilities. After the war, her husband F.R. Leavis sustained the attack. Revaluation (1956), for instance, dismissed what it described as ‘the trashy fantasies and cheap excitements of the Terror school’ as unworthy of any serious attention. Thus when D.P. Varma wrote his study of the genre, The Gothic Flame, in 1957 his tone was largely elegiac; Gothic is seen as a purely historical phenomenon, a genre which had nothing to offer the serious contemporary writer.

Gothic nonetheless continued to flourish in the period 1930–1960 in the domain of ‘popular’ culture. In the post-war era, it took forms as diverse as the ‘horror’ fiction of bestsellers like Dennis Wheatley and, above all, cinema. The Hammer House of Horror series began in 1957, inspired by the success of Hollywood Gothic in the 1930s and endless versions of the Dracula and Frankenstein stories helped Hammer to become one of the most successful British film houses over the next 20 years. With ‘Psycho’ and ‘The Birds’ (both 1963), moreover, Alfred Hitchcock demonstrated that ‘horror’ retained the potential not just for sensation, but for psychological investigations of considerable subtlety and power. From around 1960, Gothic once more began to claim the interest of ‘serious’ writers.

As the Suggestions for further study in this chapter demonstrate, it was not just Fowles and Murdoch who became aware of the potential of Gothic in this period. Indeed, aside from the authors mentioned there, many other more recent British and American writers have reworked the genre, to the extent that it has now become one of the dominant genres in contemporary writing. Its critical rehabilitation has been equally impressive. Since the late 1970s a vast number of books have been published on the genre, notable among which are Tzvetan Todorov’s The Fantastic (1978), David Punter’s The Literature of Terror (1983), Rosemary Jackson’s Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion (1983), Chris Baldick’s In the Shadow of Frankenstein (1991) and Fred Botting’s Gothic (1996).

Gothic elements in Fowles and Murdoch

In the first instance, both Fowles and Murdoch affiliate themselves to the Gothic by placing their work in an explicit relationship to earlier examples of the genre. In her important essay of 1959, The Sublime and Beautiful Revisited, Iris Murdoch praises Emily Brontë, Hawthorne, Melville and Dostoevsky as writers ‘to whom we would not want to deny a first place’ in the literary hall of fame; this is clear recognition of the achievement of a by then largely marginalised tradition, the resources of which she herself was to explore in the next decade. (The title of Murdoch’s essay echoes not just Kant, but also Burke, whose Inquiry into the Sublime and Beautiful (1756) provided a critical manifesto for eighteenth-century and Romantic Gothic.) The ominous opening of Murdoch’s The Unicorn, moreover, explicitly recalls Harker’s approach to the Count’s castle in Dracula, and a series of scenes link the central figure, Hannah Crean-Smith, to Dracula himself. Hannah also resembles the protagonist of Carmilla, another Gothic fiction by Sheridan Le Fanu, a nineteenth-century Anglo–Irish writer for whom Murdoch has expressed her admiration.

Activity

What effect does this invocation of Dracula have on our perception of Hannah? How does it complicate our perception of Hannah as a victim?
What are the implications of Murdoch’s re-gendering of the Dracula figure
as female?

Fowles is equally fascinated by earlier phases of Gothic. Thus while The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1969) cannot really be considered a Gothic novel, it is nonetheless significant that the model for Sarah Woodruff’s elusive ‘double’ identity is Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, which Fowles’ narrator describes as ‘the best guidebook to the age’. By contrast, The Collector refers explicitly to Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw.

At the level of motif, too, these novels reveal their generic lineage. Let’s have a look at The Collector. First of all it is in the form of a tale within a tale, like Shelley’s Frankenstein, Hogg’s Confessions of a Justified Sinner and James’ The Turn of the Screw and, as is often the case with these forebears, both frame and inner narratives are mediated by unreliable narrators. The Unicorn has something of the apparently rambling or expansive structure of many Romantic Gothic texts, with a continual proliferation of new plot-lines and unexpected twists. Fowles’ text has a governess figure, Miranda, who recalls the protagonist in James’ The Turn of the Screw. Marion Taylor in The Unicorn is another governess (or companion) figure who is made to face the limitations of her own knowledge by her ‘charge’. Many earlier Gothic texts focus on orphan figures and, of course, Clegg too is an orphan in the Fowles novel. Earlier Gothic is often preoccupied with extreme states of mind – even ‘madness’ – and clearly there is strong evidence for seeing both Hannah and Clegg as in some sense ‘mad’.

Activity

To what extent are Clegg and Hannah ‘mad’ or simply extremely clever or manipulative?

In terms of the physical settings of the novels, note how the architectural conventions of earlier Gothic return. While Clegg’s house is not to be compared in grandeur with the castles and monasteries of Romantic Gothic, like them it is very old (built in 1625), it is isolated, it is claustrophobic and has a basement room, once a priest’s hole, that functions as a kind of dungeon.

Activity

What uses does Murdoch’s novel make of the architecture of the great
house?

Suspense and horror, so characteristic of earlier Gothic, are heightened in contemporary equivalents like The Collector and The Unicorn by similar plot conventions, including kidnap and imprisonment – mental as well as physical. Finally, as in Romantic Gothic, violence of manifold kinds and sexual ‘deviancy’, including incest (hinted at in Hannah’s marriage to her cousin), voyeurism and sado-masochism recur in the work of Murdoch and Fowles.

Activity

What attitudes do Fowles and Murdoch invite us to take towards ‘deviant’ sexuality? To what extent are they challenging the dominant discourses about sexuality current before 1960? Can these novels be considered ‘permissive’ on the issue of sexuality?

But there are important differences, too, between contemporary Gothic and its earlier forms. Modern Gothic usually has a surface realism that allows the reader to suspend disbelief in the face of apparently extreme events and situations. It tends to ‘domesticate’ many of the genre’s established conventions, so that settings which are traditionally distanced in time or space are so now only vestigially or symbolically.

Activity

When and where is Murdoch’s novel set? Is it set in England? What is the significance of these aspects of its setting?

The same is true of social settings in modern Gothic. Although The Unicorn is set among ‘the gentry’, most modern Gothic – like The Collector – prefers a more ordinary social milieu than the religious orders or aristocracy favoured by Romantic Gothic. In certain respects Clegg is quite ordinary.

Activity

What factors make Clegg appear so ordinary?

Most obviously, the often unambiguously supernatural aspect of earlier Gothic disappears; ghosts, vampires and monsters survive only metaphorically, within a psychologically realistic framework. Possession, for instance, as in the case of Clegg or Gerald Scottow, or even Pip Lejour and Effingham Cooper, is transformed into obsession. Each behaves ‘monstrously’ without ever threatening to become non-human. The ‘domestication’ of modern Gothic relates to one of its most important insights, that the everyday and the ‘normal’ may be sources of horror and terror quite as potent as anything conceived of by earlier Gothic. In contemporary Gothic, domestic violence can be as sickening as any of the torture scenes in Romantic Gothic; an apparently innocuous neighbour or friend may become a ‘monster’ (consider the current spate of child-abuse scandals), and family and friends can be emotional ‘vampires’.

The cultural politics of modern Gothic

The Collector is a particularly good example of how modern Gothic undermines cultural and political categories like the ‘normal’ and the ‘perverse’, the ‘good’ and the ‘bad’, or the ‘sane’ and the ‘mad’. Ostensibly, it seems quite easy to place Clegg in traditional moral terms; after all, his kidnapping and imprisonment of Miranda leads directly to her death. Even in his day-to-day treatment of her, Clegg is often vile.

Activity

Collect some examples of Clegg’s behaviour which seem to you particularly reprehensible.

It is similarly tempting to dismiss Clegg as simply mad. Miranda, certainly, describes him as ‘possessed, quite out of his own control’. On Clegg’s trip to Lewes after his victim’s death, it occurs to him, too, that he is insane:

I kept remembering how people in Lewes seemed to look at me sometimes, like the people in that doctor’s waiting-room. They all knew I was mad.

But despite the invitation to judge Clegg in such black and white terms, a number of factors prevent the reader from responding so simply. Perhaps the most important reason for this is the way that Clegg is portrayed not simply as a ‘perverse’ individual, which on one level he undoubtedly is, but as representative – even stereotypically so – of a variety of attitudes which Fowles sees as characteristic of ‘mainstream society’. At one point in her diary, Miranda writes about the working-class protagonists of celebrated 1950s writers like John Braine and Alan Sillitoe. She finds Sillitoe’s Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1959) particularly disquieting and criticises the author in the following terms: ‘Perhaps Alan Sillitoe wanted to attack the society that produces such people. But he doesn’t make it clear’. This seems to provide a clue about Fowles’ real interest in this novel; he is fascinated not so much by the pathology of a single individual, but by the way that society has helped to ‘produce’ Clegg’s behaviour. The issue is highlighted by Clegg’s use of language.

Activity

What kind of language does Clegg use? Is it ‘original’ to him? If not, where does it come from? What is Miranda’s view of his language? How might one argue that, rather than language bestowing upon Clegg autonomy and subjectivity, it seems rather to confirm him as ‘subject’ – in the sense of being subject to, or subjected to, the social order which language both constructs and embodies?

This lack of subjectivity is partly evident in Clegg’s lack of imagination and the automatic way that he so often responds to Miranda. His articulation of linguistic cliché underlines his reproduction of stereotypical forms of behaviour which obviously originate in the society outside him. For example, great stress is laid upon the way that Clegg constructs his self-image and thus his sense of identity, by translating his experience into and out of the narrative forms of the mass media culture which surrounds him. Before actually meeting Miranda, for instance, Clegg admits: ‘I used to think of stories where I met her, did things she admired, married her and all that’.

Activity

When plotting the kidnap, what narratives does Clegg employ? Collect other examples of Clegg’s self-perception in terms of the narratives of the ‘popular’ media. How significant is this pattern of self-construction?

Despite Clegg’s emphasis on his isolation and alienation from the society around him, which might incline the reader to dismiss him as a freak, it is quite obvious in other ways how ‘deeply conventional’ he is. Even in his appearance, Clegg unconsciously attempts to approximate to a particular stylistic and semiotic ‘norm’. Miranda notes how his ‘trousers always have creases, his shirts are always clean. I really think he’d be happier if he wore starched collars’. His attitude to art is also deeply conventional. When Miranda asks him to choose among her drawings, Clegg ‘picked all those that looked most like the wretched bowl of fruit’.

Gender issues

But there are more important ways in which Clegg’s conventionality manifests itself.

In his expectations of gender roles and interaction, he conforms to the role expected of an old-fashioned ‘nice young man’. Thus he paradoxically treats Miranda at times as a ‘guest’, which Miranda sees as expressive of a peculiar kind of ‘chivalry’. He is forever behaving ‘according to some mad notion of the “proper thing to do”’. Indeed, their relationship sometimes seems troublingly close to a conventionally romantic one, as when Miranda tries to teach him to dance or when he takes her for the star-lit night-walk. At times, Clegg plays the attentive husband: ‘I got her breakfast…she gave me any shopping she wanted done…I cleaned up the house after I got back’.

By the same token, of course, Clegg attempts to make Miranda conform to the behaviour he deems appropriate to her status a ‘nice young woman’. He is thus horrified when she uses ‘unfeminine’ language and is deeply upset when Miranda ‘offers’ herself to him. Indeed his disappointment at such behaviour, arguably, marks the turning point of the novel, after which Miranda is doomed. What Fowles appears to allegorise, in such horrifying fashion, in this parody of the norm is the potential for the ‘normal’ marriage, similarly, to imprison and deform.

Activity

Now consider similar issues in Murdoch’s novel. What expectations do Marion and Effingham have of ‘romantic’ love? Are these expectations any less coercive or damaging than those which Clegg holds? What is Hannah’s view of love? What are both authors saying about ‘modern love’?

Clegg’s misogyny is clearly echoed by the society around him. Again, the very clichés he uses show the extent to which this is the case. After one argument with Miranda, Clegg comments: ‘She was just like a woman. Unpredictable. Smiling one minute and spiteful the next’. Appalled by Miranda’s ‘forwardness’, Clegg again retreats behind stereotype: ‘You’ve got a one-track mind, just like every woman’. The way that Clegg sees Miranda as something to collect – it ‘was like catching the mazarine Blue again’ – is part of a larger process of the reification (i.e. objectification) of women, for example in the advertisements which so often precondition Clegg’s expectations about Miranda. He comments with acerbic justice on the newspapers’ treatment of the kidnapping: ‘If she was ugly it would all have been two lines on the back page’.

The violence that Clegg manifests towards his victim is also troublingly present in society at large. He fantasises about hitting Miranda across the face ‘as I saw it done once by a chap in a telly play’. His sexual expectations also seem conditioned by the pornography which society licenses and circulates. For example, he is much taken with a work called Shoes, from which, he confesses, ‘I got some ideas’. Given the overlap between Clegg’s behaviour and what is deemed ‘normal’ in society outside, it is not, perhaps, unreasonable for him to conclude that ‘a lot of people…would do what I did or similar things if they had the money and the time’. Indeed, towards the end of her ordeal, Miranda declares: ‘He becomes the norm’.

Activity

Now consider such issues in Murdoch’s novel. Is Effingham’s attitude towards Hannah anything like Clegg’s towards Miranda? How far are there parallels between the behaviour of Clegg on the one hand and Scottow and Hannah’s husband, on the other, toward their respective captives?

Much of the horror of The Collector, then, derives from the reader’s increasing sense that Clegg is a representative rather than ‘perverse’ member of society. The contradictions in his treatment of Miranda correspond to those evident in wider society. The novel most clearly brings this out by creating a distinct series of more or less explicit parallels between Clegg and Miranda’s ‘ideal’ man, G.P., who at one point in the narrative is likened to Jane Austen’s Mr Knightley, ‘a man in a million’. Thus G.P., like Clegg, deprives Miranda of liberty in a number of important ways. Twice she describes him as like G.B. Shaw’s Professor Higgins in Pygmalion without ever fully grasping the implications of G.P.’s desire, like Clegg, to fashion her, Pygmalion-like, to his own idea of what a woman should be. G.P.’s success in this respect can be gauged by the number of times Miranda rehearses his opinions. For instance, when she comments on the state of contemporary England, she is honest enough to admit ‘these are all G.P.’s words and ideas’.

Activity

Does the reader share Miranda’s estimation of G.P.? If not, why not? Does Miranda come to ‘see through’ G.P. by the end of her ordeal? Are there parallels to be drawn in the relationship between Marion Taylor and her male mentors?

Miranda’s autonomy is limited in other ways by G.P. Like Clegg’s, his domineering behaviour contributes to Miranda’s passivity. On one of the few occasions when Miranda does draw analogies between G.P. and Clegg, she comments thus: ‘But I’m not being to the full at all. I’m just sitting and watching. Not only here. With G.P’. As with Clegg, G.P.’s power over Miranda is partly a function of his success in isolating her. He is characteristically extremely rude and unwelcoming to her friends. At moments G.P.’s desire for dominance lapses into mental sadism of a kind Clegg is never capable of. He is crushingly insensitive about Miranda’s artistic efforts when she first offers them for his inspection: ‘It was as if he had turned and hit me with his fist, I couldn’t hide it’. He responds to her disappointment with his customary brutal flippancy: ‘Have a tragic love affaire. Have your ovaries cut out. Something’.

Activity

Examine the kind of views G.P. expresses about women. To what extent are they comparable to those of Clegg?

Two other links between the supposedly ‘ideal’ G.P. and the ‘perverse’ Clegg are worth noting. First of all, of course, G.P. is another ‘collector’. Women have the same function in his life as butterflies do in Clegg’s. He boasts to Miranda:

I’ve met dozens of women and girls like you. Some I’ve known well, some I’ve seduced against their better nature, two I’ve even married. Some I’ve hardly known at all, just stood beside them at an exhibition, in the Tube, wherever.

As with Clegg, there is also an undercurrent of ‘perverse’ desire in his attitude to Miranda: ‘You’re just the daughter I’d like to have. That’s probably why I’ve wanted you so much these last few months’. Such evidence again stresses the convergence between G.P. and Clegg. At one moment Miranda writes:

He shocked me, bullied me, taunted me – never in nasty ways. Obliquely. He didn’t ever force me in any way.

While she is in fact referring to G.P., this could just as well be a description of Clegg.

Activity

To what extent can Murdoch’s novel be described as a ‘feminist’ text? Are there significant differences between her conception of gender politics and those of Fowles? Deborah Johnson has deplored Murdoch’s ‘often explicit assumption of “masculinist” perspectives and values, and its curious reluctance to deal directly or non-ironically with women’s experience’. On the evidence of this text, do you think that such criticisms are justified?

Class issues

Further points of comparison between The Collector and The Unicorn include their interest in questions of class and their intensely self-conscious citation of, and allusion to, other, earlier literary texts. These interests coincide in the attention which each text pays to the role of ‘high’ culture in constructing social identities in modern societies. The Collector explicitly explores the way in which ‘high’ culture is a field of conflict articulating wider class tensions. As you will no doubt have noticed, the text draws heavily, if at times ironically, on Shakespeare’s The Tempest.

Despite his assumption of the name Ferdinand, Clegg is, of course, far closer to the disadvantaged subject-position of Caliban. In Shakespeare’s text, Prospero and Miranda attempt to educate, or acculturate, their unfortunate host, before imprisoning him. In Fowles’ text, Miranda’s attempts to ‘correct’ and develop Clegg’s aesthetic taste are expressive of her broader hostility to the somewhat indeterminate class to which Clegg’s windfall affiliates him. She even uses the rhetoric of World War Two, describing herself as one of ‘the Few’, defending a tradition of ‘breeding’ and ‘high’ culture against the barbarians represented by Clegg. In the end, she loses confidence, asserting that ‘there’s nothing to hold back the New People, they’ll grow stronger and stronger and swamp us’.

Activity

How does Miranda’s expression of such views affect the way we see her? To what extent can Clegg be seen as a kind of Caliban, and therefore as a disadvantaged individual, even a victim? Identify the other, more personal, circumstances in his life which make him seem like a victim. What is the cultural/political significance of such reversals in his status within the moral scheme of the novel?

Miranda’s attempt to provide Clegg with an aesthetic education is founded on the delusion that access to the ‘right’ kind of culture will liberate him from the destructive attitudes to women that have led to her imprisonment. Much modern Gothic is sceptical that any distinction can be drawn between ‘high’ and ‘popular’ culture in this respect. This raises serious doubts about the status and function of ‘high’ culture, and a blurring of boundaries between culture and politics, which is symptomatic of the decade in which these texts were written more generally.

Activity

Now consider class issues in Murdoch’s novel. What is the relationship of Dennis Nolan to Hannah? What is the significance of his and Gerald’s class origin? How does awareness of these facts affect our attitude to Hannah? How are gender relations in the narratives which are cited in Murdoch’s novel characterised? Is their effect beneficial on those who consume them, like Effingham?

Suggestions for further study

While we have concentrated on The Collector and The Unicorn in this chapter of the subject guide, you need not feel obliged to stay with these texts. You can adapt the material above in a number of different ways. If you want to work up an author, instead of a genre study based around modern Gothic, you could read Fowles’ The Magus (1966), or Murdoch’s A Severed Head (1961) or The Italian Girl (1964) which are also all modern Gothic novels. You might want to study other modern Gothic writers – for example, Angela Carter, Muriel Spark, Jean Rhys, Emma Tennant or Fay Weldon.

A selection of such texts might include Carter’s The Magic Toyshop (1969) or The Passion of New Eve (1975); Spark’s The Ballad of Peckham Rye (1960) or The Driver’s Seat (1970); Tennant’s The Bad Sister (1975) or Wild Nights (1979); Weldon’s Praxis (1978) or The Life and Loves of a She-Devil (1982); Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea (1966); David Storey’s Radcliffe (1963).If you are interested in the historical development of Gothic, you might want to compare an example of modern Gothic with an example of Romantic or Victorian Gothic – for instance, M.G. Lewis’s The Monk (1796) or Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1847),

Learning outcomes

By the end of this chapter, having studied the essential reading and some of the associated critical texts, you should be able to:

Sample essay questions

You are unlikely to get questions in the examination specifically on modern Gothic; see the sample examination paper at the end of this subject guide for a clearer idea of how you would have to adapt your knowledge of Gothic to answer examination questions.

  1. 1. In what ways and to what effect does the contemporary novel borrow from popular culture?
  2. 2. Taking two novels of your own choice, attempt a definition of the characteristics of modern Gothic.
  3. 3. ‘Modern Gothic derives its effects from disturbing received conceptions of normality and perversity.’ Discuss in relation to two novels.
  4. 4. In what ways does contemporary Gothic both recycle and challenge the conventions and assumptions of earlier phases of the genre?