The Social Novel and the Gothic

Abstract

The ease with which the Gothic can be gestured towards as a phenomenon, the readiness with which it can be identified through the isolation of recurrent motifs such as the haunted castle or the criminal monk, has the unfortunate effect of rendering the genre non-problematic at the very moment when we focus our attention upon it. The confidence with which we assume a tradition of Gothic from Horace Walpole to Beckford and Clara Reeve prevents us from asking why Gothic should have developed so rapidly in the last decade of the eighteenth century and, more particularly, why it should have succeeded the Sentimental novel, with which it has certain affinities. There is no real continuity and we must rather explain why novelists should have closed their Sir Charles Grandison and reopened their Clarissa, and why even writers who were certainly influenced by Rousseau, such as Anne Radcliffe and Charlotte Smith, should nevertheless have eschewed the model of La Nouvelle Hélozse.