Thanks for writing and sharing the gothic lit essay, really love ur thoughts & insights! I enjoy a lot of gothic works and a friend (not very involved in the arts) had asked me what is gothic literature and how do you define or sum up the genre. I ended up mostly describing tropes and Im curious how u would explain What Is the gothic genre in lit
You're very welcome, anon! And yeah, it can be a tricky one to sum up in a lot of ways, especially as it does tend to be associated more with tropes and a certain aesthetic, but I would say that fundamentally gothic literature / gothic storytelling is about inheritance, legacy and autonomy, and the corruption, perversion and/or destruction of all three.
What that means varies pretty greatly too - inheritance is sometimes purely financial or estate-based (and also what someone is owed), especially in very early gothic literature, but it's also (very) frequently twisted up in, and about inherited trauma, inherited faith, inherited ideas a character must try and grow beyond or with or around, just as legacy often means children (or in the case of some of gothicism's most iconic archetypes - vampiric fledglings or the victims of werewolf bites) or reputation, but it also is vastly steeped in religious legacy (which in turn is usually tied to inherited religious trauma, but also the corruption of religious influence as its own legacy), cultural legacy (particularly in Southern Gothic - Sinners embraced and explored this extremely beautifully, but you also see this with the explosion of Black Exploitation Horror in the 70s which was heavily influenced by European gothic storytelling, from Blacula to Sugar Hill to [a personal fave] Ganja and Hess, and the rich 80s/90s Black Southern Gothic movement with authors like Octavia E. Butler and Toni Morrison). The legacy of place (haunted houses, haunted landscapes, place as something that remembers even when people do not) is also enormously important in this sense.
And, of course, autonomy, which at it's origin point is deeply tied to the gothic genre's roots in early feminism and women's desire for, and concerns about autonomy. I won't go too much into that, as I discussed it in that last reply about marriage, but I will add that it's also inherently present in the genre's fixation on the witch, hag, and fallen woman as a figure, but at the same time, it extends well beyond gender alone, particularly in terms of class, race and sexuality.
All three of those themes generally feature in gothic literature, but they feature in other genres too, and I think what sets gothicism apart is that, as a genre, it's not particularly interested in exploring any of those themes in tidy, moralistic, or easy ways, which is where the elements of corruption, perversion and destruction come into play. The characters who inherit either don't want it, or lose/sacrifice themselves to get it, legacy is generally traumatised, incestuous or forced, or infiltrated, eroded and ravaged, or all of the above, and autonomy is often naively given or insidiously taken, and, only sometimes, really fought for.
Grief usually plays a big role in gothic literature too - I said it in my Bryonic Hero post, but there's a big school of thought that thinks gothic stories are about dead women and the men who mourn them (which IWTV certainly fits into!), but I would say that has it's hooks in all three of those central themes above, even if it does often exist as it's own theme too. After all, Claudia's arc is still, I think, predominantly about her lack of autonomy, her failure at her parents' hands to inherit the body she was owed, and her legacy as Louis and Lestat's lost daughter.
So yeah: inheritance, legacy and autonomy, explored in a million different ways, haha.
That's the genre, in my opinion.
