Art of Darkness - Essay Example

Generally acknowledged to have started with the publication of Horace Walpole’s novel The Castle of Otranto in 1764, the Gothic genre represents a fundamental shift in thinking from one dominated by ideals and reason to one of imagination and emotion. Gothic literature is characterized by its unique way of combining horror and romance to create a completely new genre that, particularly after the advent of Sigmund Freud and his psychoanalytic theory, focused more and more on the power of the mind to terrify itself. Common elements found within Gothic literature include terror, the supernatural, ghosts, haunted houses with a particular type of architecture, castles, darkness, death, madness, secrets, and hereditary curses. Characters typically fall into stereotypical personas such as femmes fatales, flawed heroes, monsters of various types, and flawed individuals. Typically, there were three characteristics that served to designate a Gothic novel. These included the concept of the sublime, the presence of darkness, and the exploration of psychometry. The sublime refers to the presence of something that isn’t there, something intangible that is nevertheless felt. While used in texts prior to the Gothic development to refer to something that is beneficial and ‘Godlike’, this concept also lends itself strongly to the Gothic novel as it referred to the elements of supernatural evil. While the concept of darkness may seem to be relatively straightforward, the following discussion will reveal several ways in which this idea can be interpreted. Finally, psychometry refers to the idea of a conflict between the body and the soul. It was an often-used technique in Gothic novels because of the obvious relationship of this to the concept of madness. It is typically in this context that Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein has been interpreted as it contains all of these elements.