Gothic fiction

Gothic literature is often described with words such as "wonder" and "terror."[4] This sense of wonder and terror, which provides the suspension of disbelief so important to the Gothic—which, except for when it is parodied, even for all its occasional melodrama, is typically played straight, in a self-serious manner—requires the imagination of the reader to be willing to accept the idea that there might be something "beyond that which is immediately in front of us." The mysterious imagination necessary for Gothic literature to have gained any traction had been growing for some time before the advent of the Gothic. The necessity for this came as the known world was beginning to become more explored, reducing the inherent geographical mysteries of the world. The edges of the map were being filled in, and no one was finding any dragons. The human mind required a replacement.[5] Clive Bloom theorizes that this void in the collective imagination was critical in the development of the cultural possibility for the rise of the Gothic tradition.[6]

Les morts pour rire (1859), drawing by G. A. Bécquer.

The setting of most early Gothic works was a medieval one, but this had been a common theme long before Walpole. In Britain especially, there was a desire to reclaim a shared past. This obsession frequently led to extravagant architectural displays, and sometimes mock tournaments were held. It was not merely in literature that a medieval revival made itself felt, and this too contributed to a culture ready to accept a perceived medieval work in 1764.[5]

The Gothic often uses scenery of decay, death, and morbidity to achieve its effects (especially in the Italian Horror school of Gothic). However, Gothic literature was not the origin of this tradition; indeed it was far older. The corpses, skeletons, and churchyards so commonly associated with the early Gothic were popularized by the Graveyard Poets, and were also present in novels such as Daniel Defoe's Journal of the Plague Year, which contains comical scenes of plague carts and piles of plague corpses. Even earlier, poets like Edmund Spenser evoked a dreary and sorrowful mood in such poems as Epithalamion.[5]

Fishermen at Sea (1796) by J. M. W. Turner.

All of the aspects of pre-Gothic literature mentioned above occur to some degree in the Gothic, but even taken together, they still fall short of true Gothic.[5] What was lacking was an aesthetic, which would serve to tie the elements together. Bloom notes that this aesthetic must take the form of a theoretical or philosophical core, which is necessary to "sav[e] the best tales from becoming mere anecdote or incoherent sensationalism."[7] In this case, the aesthetic needed to be an emotional one, which was finally provided by Edmund Burke's 1757 work, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful, which "finally codif[ied] the gothic emotional experience."[8] Specifically, Burke's thoughts on the Sublime, Terror, and Obscurity were most applicable. These sections can be summarized thus: the Sublime is that which is or produces the "strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling"; the Sublime is most often evoked by Terror; and to cause Terror we need some amount of Obscurity – we can't know everything about that which is inducing Terror – or else "a great deal of the apprehension vanishes"; Obscurity is necessary in order to experience the Terror of the unknown.[5] Bloom asserts that Burke's descriptive vocabulary was essential to the Romantic works that eventually informed the Gothic.

The birth of Gothic was thought to have been influenced by political upheaval. Researchers linked its birth with the English Civil War and culminating in a Jacobite rebellion (1745) more recent to the first Gothic novel (1764). A collective political memory and any deep cultural fears associated with it likely contributed to early Gothic villain characters as literary representatives of defeated Tory barons or Royalists "rising" from their political graves in the pages of the early Gothic to terrorize the bourgeois reader of late eighteenth-century England.[9][10][11][12]

The novel usually regarded as the first Gothic novel is The Castle of Otranto by English author Horace Walpole, which was first published in 1764.[13] Walpole's declared aim was to combine elements of the medieval romance, which he deemed too fanciful, and the modern novel, which he considered to be too confined to strict realism.[14] The basic plot created many other staple Gothic generic traits, including threatening mysteries and ancestral curses, as well as countless trappings such as hidden passages and oft-fainting heroines.

Walpole published the first edition disguised as a medieval romance from Italy discovered and republished by a fictitious translator. When Walpole admitted to his authorship in the second edition, its originally favourable reception by literary reviewers changed into rejection. The reviewers' rejection reflected a larger cultural bias: the romance was usually held in contempt by the educated as a tawdry and debased kind of writing; the genre had gained some respectability only through the works of Samuel Richardson and Henry Fielding.[15] A romance with superstitious elements, and moreover void of didactical intention, was considered a setback and not acceptable. Walpole's forgery, together with the blend of history and fiction, contravened the principles of the Enlightenment and associated the Gothic novel with fake documentation.

Clara Reeve, best known for her work The Old English Baron (1778), set out to take Walpole's plot and adapt it to the demands of the time by balancing fantastic elements with 18th-century realism.[13] In her preface, Reeve wrote: "This Story is the literary offspring of The Castle of Otranto, written upon the same plan, with a design to unite the most attractive and interesting circumstances of the ancient Romance and modern Novel."[13] The question now arose whether supernatural events that were not as evidently absurd as Walpole's would not lead the simpler minds to believe them possible.[16]

Reeve's contribution in the development of the Gothic fiction, therefore, can be demonstrated on at least two fronts. In the first, there is the reinforcement of the Gothic narrative framework, one that focuses on expanding the imaginative domain so as to include the supernatural without losing the realism that marks the novel that Walpole pioneered.[17] Secondly, Reeve also sought to contribute to finding the appropriate formula to ensure that the fiction is believable and coherent. The result is that she spurned specific aspects to Walpole's style such as his tendency to incorporate too much humor or comic elements in such a way that it diminishes the Gothic tale's ability to induce fear. In 1777, Reeve enumerated Walpole's excesses in this respect:

a sword so large as to require an hundred men to lift it; a helmet that by its own weight forces a passage through a court-yard into an arched vault, big enough for a man to go through; a picture that walks out of its frame; a skeleton ghost in a hermit's cowl...[18]

Although the succession of Gothic writers did not exactly heed Reeve's focus on emotional realism, she was able to posit a framework that keeps Gothic fiction within the realm of the probable. This aspect remains a challenge for authors in this genre after the publication of The Old English Baron. Outside of its providential context, the supernatural would often suffer the risk of veering towards the absurd.[19]

Ann Radcliffe developed the technique of the explained supernatural in which every seemingly supernatural intrusion is eventually traced back to natural causes.[20] Radcliffe has been called both "the Great Enchantress" and "Mother Radcliffe" due to her influence on Gothic literature and the female Gothic.[21] Radcliffe's use of visual elements and their effects constitutes an innovative strategy for reading the world through “linguistic visual patterns” and developing an “ethical gaze”, allowing for readers to visualize the events through words, understand the situations, and feel the terror which the characters themselves are experiencing.[21]

Her success attracted many imitators.[22] Among other elements, Ann Radcliffe introduced the brooding figure of the Gothic villain (A Sicilian Romance in 1790), a literary device that would come to be defined as the Byronic hero. Radcliffe's novels, above all The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), were bestsellers. However, along with most novels at the time, they were looked down upon by many well-educated people as sensationalist nonsense.

Radcliffe also inspired the emerging idea of "Gothic feminism", which she expressed through the idea of female power through pretended and staged weakness. The establishment of this idea began the movement of the female gothic to be "challenging… the concept of gender itself".[23]

Radcliffe also provided an aesthetic for the genre in an influential article "On the Supernatural in Poetry",[24] examining the distinction and correlation between horror and terror in Gothic fiction,[25] utilizing the uncertainties of terror in her works to produce a model of the uncanny.[26] Combining experiences of terror and wonder with visual description was a technique that pleased readers and set Radcliffe apart from other Gothic writers.[27]

In his novel Vathek (1786), composed originally in French, Beckford capitalised on the eighteenth century obsession with all things Oriental, combining it with the Gothic stylings of Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto.

At least two Gothic authors utilize the literary concept of translation as a framing device for their novels. Ann Radcliffe's Gothic novel The Italian boasts a weighty framing, wherein her narrator claims that the story the reader is about to hear has been recorded and translated from a manuscript entrusted to an Italian man by a close friend who overheard the story confessed in a church. Radcliffe uses this translational framing to evidence how her extraordinary story has traveled to the reader.[28] In the fictitious preface to his Gothic novel The Castle of Otranto, Horace Walpole claims his story was produced in Italy, recorded in German, then discovered and translated in English. Walpole's story of transnational translation lends his novel an air of tempting exoticism that is highly characteristic of the Gothic genre.[29]

The term Schauerroman is sometimes equated with the term "Gothic novel", but this is only partially true. Both genres are based on the terrifying side of the Middle Ages, and both frequently feature the same elements (castles, ghost, monster, etc.). However, Schauerroman's key elements are necromancy and secret societies and it is remarkably more pessimistic than the British Gothic novel. All those elements are the basis for Friedrich von Schiller's unfinished novel The Ghost-Seer (1786–1789). The motive of secret societies is also present in the Karl Grosse's Horrid Mysteries (1791–1794) and Christian August Vulpius's Rinaldo Rinaldini, the Robber Captain (1797).[31]

Genres of Gespensterroman/Geisterroman ("ghost novel"), Räuberroman ("robber novel"), and Ritterroman ("chivalry novel") also frequently share plot and motifs with the British "gothic novel".

As its name suggests, the Räuberroman focuses on the life and deeds of outlaws, influenced by Friedrich von Schiller's drama The Robbers (1781). Heinrich Zschokke's Abällino, der grosse Bandit (1793) was translated into English by M.G. Lewis as The Bravo of Venice in 1804.

The Ritterroman focuses on the life and deeds of the knights and soldiers, but features many elements found in the gothic novel, such as magic, secret tribunals, and medieval setting.

Benedikte Naubert's novel Hermann of Unna (1788) is seen as being very close to the Schauerroman genre.[32]

Other early authors and works included Christian Heinrich Spiess, with his works Das Petermännchen (1793), Der alte Überall und Nirgends (1792), Die Löwenritter (1794), and Hans Heiling, vierter und letzter Regent der Erd- Luft- Feuer- und Wasser-Geister (1798); Heinrich von Kleist's short story "Das Bettelweib von Locarno" (1797); and Ludwig Tieck's Der blonde Eckbert (1797) and Der Runenberg (1804).[33] Early examples of female-authored Gothic include Sophie Albrecht's Das höfliche Gespenst (1797) and Graumännchen oder die Burg Rabenbühl: eine Geistergeschichte altteutschen Ursprungs (1799).[34]

The roman noir ("black novel") appeared in France, by such writers as François Guillaume Ducray-Duminil, Baculard d'Arnaud and Madame de Genlis.

The Marquis de Sade used a subgothic framework for some of his fiction, notably The Misfortunes of Virtue (1791) and Eugenie de Franval, though the Marquis himself never thought of his like this. Sade critiqued the genre in the preface of his Reflections on the novel (1800) stating that the Gothic is "the inevitable product of the revolutionary shock with which the whole of Europe resounded". Contemporary critics of the genre also noted the correlation between the French Revolutionary Terror and the "terrorist school" of writing represented by Radcliffe and Lewis.[35]

Russian Gothic was not, until the 1990s, viewed as a genre or label by Russian critics. If used, the word "gothic" was used to describe (mostly early) works of Fyodor Dostoyevsky. Most critics simply used tags such as "Romanticism" and "fantastique", such as in the 1984 story collection translated into English as Russian 19th-Century Gothic Tales , but originally titled Фантастический мир русской романтической повести, literally, “The Fantastic World of Russian Romanticism Short Story/Novella”.[36] However, since the mid-1980s, Russian gothic fiction as a genre began to be discussed in books such as The Gothic-Fantastic in Nineteenth-Century Russian Literature, European Gothic: A Spirited Exchange 1760–1960, The Russian Gothic novel and its British antecedents and Goticheskiy roman v Rossii (The Gothic Novel in Russia).

The first Russian author whose work has been described as gothic fiction is considered to be Nikolay Mikhailovich Karamzin. While many of his works feature gothic elements, the first considered to belong purely under the gothic fiction label is Ostrov Borngolm (Island of Bornholm) from 1793.[37] Nearly ten years later, Nikolay Ivanovich Gnedich followed suit with his 1803 novel Don Corrado de Gerrera, set in Spain in the reign of Philip II.[38]

The excesses, stereotypes, and frequent absurdities of traditional Gothic made it rich territory for satire.[43] The most famous parody of the Gothic is Jane Austen's novel Northanger Abbey (1818), in which the naive protagonist, after reading too much Gothic fiction, conceives herself a heroine of a Radcliffian romance and imagines murder and villainy on every side, though the truth turns out to be much more prosaic. Jane Austen's novel is valuable for including a list of early Gothic works since known as the Northanger Horrid Novels. These books with their lurid titles were once thought to be the creations of Jane Austen's imagination, though later research by Michael Sadleir and Montague Summers confirmed that they actually existed and stimulated renewed interest in the Gothic. They are currently being reprinted.[44]

Another example of Gothic parody in a similar vein is The Heroine by Eaton Stannard Barrett (1813). Cherry Wilkinson, a fatuous female protagonist with a history of novel-reading, fancies herself as the heroine of a Gothic romance. She perceives and models reality according to the stereotypes and typical plot structures of the Gothic novel, leading to a series of absurd events culminating in catastrophe. After her downfall, her affectations and excessive imaginations become eventually subdued by the voice of reason in the form of Stuart, a paternal figure, under whose guidance the protagonist receives a sound education and correction of her misguided taste.[45]

The genre also influenced American writing, creating a Southern Gothic genre that combines some Gothic sensibilities such as the grotesque with the setting and style of the American South. Examples include Erskine Caldwell, William Faulkner, Carson McCullers, John Kennedy Toole, Manly Wade Wellman, Eudora Welty, Rhodi Hawk, Tennessee Williams, Truman Capote, Flannery O'Connor, Davis Grubb, Anne Rice, Harper Lee and Cormac McCarthy.[80]

Such Gothic romances became popular in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s with authors such as Phyllis A. Whitney, Joan Aiken, Dorothy Eden, Victoria Holt, Barbara Michaels, Mary Stewart and Jill Tattersall. Many featured covers showing a terror-stricken woman in diaphanous attire in front of a gloomy castle, often with a single lit window. Many were published under the Paperback Library Gothic imprint and marketed to female readers. While the authors were mostly women, some men wrote Gothic romances under female pseudonyms: the prolific Clarissa Ross and Marilyn Ross were pseudonyms of the male Dan Ross; Frank Belknap Long published Gothics under his wife's name, Lyda Belknap Long; the British writer Peter O'Donnell wrote under the pseudonym Madeleine Brent. Apart from imprints like Love Spell, discontinued in 2010, very few books seem to embrace the term these days.[81]

Strawberry Hill, an English villa in the "Gothic Revival" style, built by Gothic writer Horace Walpole

Gothic literature is intimately associated with the Gothic Revival architecture of the same era. In a way similar to the Gothic revivalists' rejection of the clarity and rationalism of the neoclassical style of the Enlightened Establishment, the literary Gothic embodies an appreciation of the joys of extreme emotion, the thrills of fearfulness and awe inherent in the sublime, and a quest for atmosphere.

Ruins of Gothic buildings give rise to multiple linked emotions by representing inevitable decay and the collapse of human creations – hence the urge to add fake ruins as eyecatchers in English landscape parks. English Gothic writers often associated medieval buildings with what they saw as a dark and terrifying period, marked by harsh laws enforced by torture and with mysterious, fantastic, and superstitious rituals. In literature such anti-Catholicism had a European dimension featuring Roman Catholic institutions such as the Inquisition (in southern European countries such as Italy and Spain).

Just as elements of Gothic architecture were borrowed in the Gothic Revival period in architecture, so ideas about the Gothic period and Gothic architecture are often used by Gothic novelists. Architecture itself plays a role in naming Gothic novels, with many titles referring to castles or other common Gothic buildings. Such naming is followed up in many cases by setting them in Gothic buildings: the action takes place in castles, abbeys, convents and monasteries, many in ruins, evoking "feelings of fear, surprise, confinement". Placing a story in a Gothic building serves several purposes. It draws on feelings of awe, implies that the story is set in the past, gives an impression of isolation or dissociation from the rest of the world, and draws on Gothic religious associations. The trend towards Gothic architecture began with The Castle of Otranto and became a major element in the genre thereafter.[20]

Besides using Gothic architecture as a setting, with the aim of eliciting certain associations from the reader, there was an equally close association between the settings and the storylines of Gothic novels, with the architecture often serving as a mirror for the characters and events of the story.[108] The buildings in The Castle of Otranto, for example, are riddled with tunnels, which characters use to move back and forth in secret. This secret movement mirrors one of the plots in the story: the secrets surrounding Manfred's possession of the castle and how it came into his family.[109] Setting the novel in a Gothic castle was meant to imply not only a story set in the past, but one shrouded in darkness.

In William Thomas Beckford's The History of the Caliph Vathek, architecture is used to illustrate certain elements of Vathek's character and to warn of the dangers of over-reaching. Vathek's hedonism and devotion to pleasure are reflected in the pleasure wings he adds on to his castle, each with the express purpose of satisfying a different sense. He builds a tall tower in order to further his quest for knowledge. This tower stands for Vathek's pride and desire for a power beyond the reach of humans. He is later warned that he must destroy the tower and return to Islam, or risk dire consequences. Vathek's pride wins out, and in the end his quest for power and knowledge ends with him confined to Hell.[110]

In The Castle of Wolfenbach, the castle of refuge for Matilda while on the run is thought to be haunted. Matilda finds it is not ghosts, but the Countess who lives on the upper floors and has been forced into hiding by her husband, the Count. Matilda's discovery of her and revealing her presence there to others destroys the Count's secret. Shortly after Matilda meets the Countess, the Castle of Wolfenbach itself is destroyed in a fire, mirroring the destruction of the Count's attempts to keep his wife a secret, so that his plots throughout the story eventually lead to his own destruction.[111]

The picturesque and evocative ruin is a common theme in Gothic literature. This image shows the ruins of Kenilworth Castle.

The main action in The Romance of the Forest is set in an abandoned, ruined abbey. The building itself serves as a moral lesson, as well as a major setting for the action in the novel. This use of a ruined abbey, drawing on Burke's aesthetic theory of the sublime and the beautiful, establishes it a place of terror and of safety. Burke argued that the sublime was a source of awe or fear brought about by strong emotions, such as terror or mental pain. On the other end of the spectrum was the beautiful, the things that brought pleasure and safety. He argued that the sublime was to be preferred. Related to the concepts of the sublime and the beautiful is the idea of the picturesque, introduced by William Gilpin, which was thought to exist between the two extremes. The picturesque was what continued elements of the sublime and the beautiful, as the natural or uncultivated beauty in a ruin or a partially overgrown building. In The Romance of the Forest Adeline and the La Mottes live in constant fear of discovery by the police or by Adeline's father, and at times certain characters believe the castle to be haunted. Yet it also serves as a comfort, providing characters with shelter and safety. Finally, it is picturesque, in that it serves as a combination of the natural and the human. Thus Radcliffe could use architecture to draw on the aesthetic theories of the time and set the tone of the story in the minds of the reader. As with many buildings in Gothic novels, the abbey also has a series of tunnels. These serve as both a hiding place for characters and a place of secrets. This was mirrored later in the novel with Adeline hiding from the Marquis de Montalt and the secrets of the Marquis, which eventually leads to his downfall and Adeline's salvation.[112]

Architecture serves as an additional character in many Gothic novels, bringing with it associations with the past and with secrets, and in many cases moving the action along and foretelling future events in the story.

Silence (1799-1801), an oil on canvas by Henry Fuseli.

From the castles, dungeons, forests and hidden passages of the Gothic novel genre emerged female Gothic. Guided by the works of authors such as Ann Radcliffe, Mary Shelley and Charlotte Brontë, the female Gothic allowed female societal and sexual desires to be introduced.

The female Gothic differs from the male Gothic through differences in narrative technique, plot, assumptions of the supernatural and use of terror and horror. Female Gothic narratives focus on such topics as a persecuted heroine in flight from a villainous father and in search of an absent mother, while male writers tend towards masculine transgression of social taboos. The emergence of the ghost story gave female writers something to write about besides the common marriage plot, allowing them to present a more radical critique of male power, violence and predatory sexuality.[113]

It has been said that medieval society, on which some Gothic texts are based, allowed women writers to attribute "features of the mode [of Gothicism] as the result of the suppression of female sexuality, or else as a challenge to the gender hierarchy and values of a male-dominated culture".[114]

Significantly, development of the female Gothic was accompanied by a literary technique of explaining the supernatural. The Supernatural Explained – as the technique was aptly named – is a recurring plot device in Radcliffe's The Romance of the Forest. The novel, published in 1791, is among Radcliffe's earlier works. It sets up suspense for horrific events, which all have natural explanations. However, the omission of any possible explanation based in reality is what instills a feeling of anxiety and terror in both character and reader.

An 18th-century response to the novel from the Monthly Review reads, "We must hear no more of enchanted forests and castles, giants, dragons, walls of fire and other 'monstrous and prodigious things – yet still forests and castles remain, and it is still within the province of fiction, without overstepping the limits of nature, to make use of them for the purpose of creating surprise."[115]

Radcliffe's use of The Supernatural Explained is typical of a Gothic author. The female protagonists pursued in the texts are often caught in unfamiliar, terrifying landscape eliciting higher degrees of terror. The result is the explained supernatural rather than terrors familiar to women such as rape or incest or expected ghosts in haunted castles. Female Gothic also treats of women's discontent with patriarchal society, their problematic and dissatisfying maternal position and their role within that society.[113] Women's fears of entrapment in the domestic, the female body, marriage, childbirth or domestic abuse commonly appear. The formula is said to be "a plot that resists an unhappy or ambiguous closure and explains the supernatural".[113]

Radcliffe's The Romance of the Forest has us follow the female protagonist, Adeline, through the forest, hidden passages and abbey dungeons, "without exclaiming, 'How these antique towers and vacant courts/ chill the suspended soul, till expectation wears the cast of fear!"[115]

The decision of female Gothic writers to supplement true supernatural horrors with explained cause and effect transforms romantic plots and Gothic tales into common life and writing. Rather than establish the romantic plot in impossible events, Radcliffe strays away from writing "merely fables, which no stretch of fancy could realize."[116]

The English scholar Chloe Chard's introduction to The Romance of the Forest refers to a "promised effect of terror", but the outcome "may prove less horrific than the novel has originally suggested". Radcliffe sets up suspense throughout the novel, insinuating a supernatural or superstitious cause to the mysterious and horrific occurrences. Yet the suspense is relieved with The Supernatural Explained.

For example, Adeline is reading scarcely legible manuscripts she found in her bedchamber's secret passage, when she hears a chilling noise outside her door. She goes to sleep unsettled, only to wake and learn that what she assumed to be haunting spirits were actually domestic voices of the servant, Peter. La Motte, her caretaker in the abbey, recognizes the heights to which her imagination reached after reading the autobiographical manuscripts of a past murdered man in the abbey.

"'I do not wonder, that after you had suffered its terrors to impress your imagination, you fancied you saw specters, and heard wondrous noises.' La Motte said.

'God bless you! Ma'amselle,' said Peter.

'I'm sorry I frightened you so last night.'

'Frightened me,' said Adeline; 'how was you concerned in that?'

He then informed her that thinking Monsieur and Madame La Motte were asleep, he had stolen to her chamber door... that he had called several times as loudly as he dared, but receiving no answer believed she was asleep.... This account of the voice she had heard relieved Adeline's spirits; she was even surprised she did not know it, till remembering the perturbation of her mind for some time preceding, this surprise disappeared."[117]

While Adeline is alone in her typically Gothic chamber, she detects something supernatural or mysterious about the setting. Although the "actual sounds that she hears are accounted for by the efforts of the faithful servant to communicate with her, there is still a hint of supernatural in her dream, inspired, it would seem, by the fact that she is on the spot of her father's murder and that his unburied skeleton is concealed in the room next hers."[118]

The supernatural here is indefinitely explained, but what remains is a "tendency in the human mind to reach out beyond the tangible and the visible; and it is in depicting this mood of vague and half-defined emotion that Mrs. Radcliffe excels."[118]

Transmuting the Gothic novel into a comprehensible tale for the imaginative 18th-century woman was useful for female Gothic writers of the time. Novels were an experience for these women, who had no outlet for a thrilling excursion. Sexual encounters and superstitious fantasies were idle elements of the imagination. However, the use of the female Gothic and The Supernatural Explained, are a "good example of how the formula [Gothic novel] changes to suit the interests and needs of its current readers."

In many respects, the novel's "current reader" of the time was the woman who, even as she enjoyed such novels, would feel she had to "[lay] down her book with affected indifference, or momentary shame,"[119] according to Jane Austen, author of Northanger Abbey. The Gothic novel shaped its form for female readers to "turn to Gothic romances to find support for their own mixed feelings."[120]

After the characteristic Gothic Bildungsroman-like plot sequence, female Gothic allowed readers to grow from "adolescence to maturity",[121] in the face of the realized impossibilities of the supernatural. As protagonists in novels like Adeline in The Romance of the Forest learn that their superstitious fantasies and terrors are replaced by natural cause and reasonable doubt, the reader may grasp the true position of the heroine in the novel:

"The heroine possesses the romantic temperament that perceives strangeness where others see none. Her sensibility, therefore, prevents her from knowing that her true plight is her condition, the disability of being female."[121]

Another text in which the heroine of the Gothic novel encounters The Supernatural Explained is The Castle of Wolfenbach (1793) by Gothic author Eliza Parsons. This female Gothic text by Parsons is listed as one of Catherine Morland's Gothic texts in Austen's Northanger Abbey. The heroine in The Castle of Wolfenbach, Matilda, seeks refuge after overhearing a conversation in which her Uncle Weimar speaks of plans to rape her. Matilda finds asylum in the Castle of Wolfenbach, inhabited by old married caretakers who claim the second floor is haunted. Matilda, as the courageous heroine, decides to explore this mysterious wing of the castle.

Bertha, wife of Joseph, caretakers of the castle, tells Matilda of the "other wing": "Now for goodness sake, dear madam, don't go no farther, for as sure as you are alive, here the ghosts live, for Joseph says he often sees lights and hears strange things."[122]

However, as Matilda ventures through, she finds the wing is not haunted by ghosts and rattling chains, but by the Countess of Wolfenbach. The supernatural is explained, in this case, 10 pages into the novel, and the natural cause of the superstitious noises is a Countess in distress. Characteristically in female Gothic, the natural cause of terror is not the supernatural, but female disability and societal horrors: rape, incest and the threatening control of a male antagonist.

Educators in literary, cultural, and architectural studies appreciate the Gothic as an area that facilitates investigation of the beginnings of scientific certainty. As Carol Senf has stated, "the Gothic was... a counterbalance produced by writers and thinkers who felt limited by such a confident worldview and recognized that the power of the past, the irrational, and the violent continue to hold sway in the world."[123] As such, the Gothic helps students better understand their own doubts about the self-assurance of today's scientists. Scotland is the location of what was probably the world's first postgraduate program to consider the genre exclusively: the MLitt in the Gothic Imagination at the University of Stirling, first recruited in 1996.[124]