Stephen King probably put it best when he said, "I recognize terror as the finest emotion and so I will try to terrorize the reader. But if I find that I cannot terrify, I will try to horrify, and if I find that I cannot horrify, I'll go for the gross-out. I'm not proud."
As King's ideas suggest, horror--and its related genre, gothic-- serves an important function: it presents the reader with ideas and situations they fundamentally fear. Why Read About Things We Fear? Part of the function of all literature (horror or not) is to give us a window on the world and a mirror into ourselves. Through literature, we look out onto other cultures, peoples, times, mentalities, beliefs, and experiences, some of which we can never share. Literature is also a tool for self-examination, a mirror into our own psyches or experiences as well, where we confront issues or questions or problems we have in our own selves and use fiction as a way of understanding them. In both cases, the object is the same: to understand the reality of ourselves and the world around us. Our fears are a crucial part of that. Along with our loves or our dislikes or our challenges, our fears are an important ingredient in defining who we are as individuals. Why Read Horror in an AP Lit Class? More than almost any other genre, horror works in the realm of the symbolic and the subtextual. By its very nature, good horror compels the reader to examine the complex interplay between text and subtext, literal and symbolic meaning, and to make repeated inferences based on evidence to support an overall understanding of the meaning of the work as a whole. Furthermore, horror uses its tropes to explore issues and topics that straightforward, realistic fiction often can't get away with due to the restrictions of a particular society, place, and time. Because of that tendency, students get used to looking at horror through that symbolic lens to ask what kind of tensions or issues in the larger society this work is addressing. |
Difference Between Horror and Gothic
Gothic fiction comes out of Romanticism, the literary and artistic movement that arose in the early 1800s. Romanticism valued the emotional over the rational, the intuitive over the scientific, intense emotion over cold rationality. Romanticism valued and elevated folk culture and encounters with nature and the wild--but there's a dark side. The dark side is this: Intense emotion can also be intensely violent or intensely self-destructive or intensely fearful. Nature is beautiful butterflies, but also ravenous bears. Rejecting rationality sounds fun--but the flip side of rationality is irrationality, insanity, hallucination, psychosis, altered states of consciousness. In short, think of Gothic as Romanticism's dark side. What is Gothic? The word "Gothic" in this sense is a callback to the Gothic architecture in the early Middle Ages, structures that (by 1800) were largely creepy and crumbling, and therefore great settings for scary events. The first English work properly called "Gothic" is English writer Horace Walpole's 1764 novel The Castle of Otranto. Since then, here are some prominent Gothic writers in that original period:
It's very much associated with fear, supernatural events, and the terros of the past coming to haunt those in the present. This is VERY important, and it's really hard to imagine a Gothic novel or film in which the past did not play a significant role. Gothic Settings The role of the past is one reason the Gothic uses setting such as decaying buildings--the literal relics of the past there in the present. Crumbling castles, decaying abbeys and churches, medieval guildings, crypts--all of these are classic for Gothic works, but in more modern times, those can include abandoned houses, old buildings, abandoned asylums, or that creepy house at the end of the block. Gothic Characters It's also not uncommon for Gothic characters to have a strong link to the past. Members of ancient families, ancient aristocracies, etc. are very common, especially since you get to bring in creepy families along with the crumbling castle. Especially in early Gothic fiction, a heroine in trouble from a creepy person inside an abandoned castle was the essence of Gothic, but as times changed, the genre evolved. Who Writes Gothic Horror? From the beginning, the gothic and horror genres have been dominated by people who, in one way or another, were not of the mainstream. They may have been Irish or Irish-descended writers working in an empire that viewed Irish people as less-evolved humans (Stoker, Wilde, Charlotte Bronte, Emily Bronte, Le Fanu, Maturin). They may have been women in a highly patriarchal culture (Radcliffe, both Bronte sisters, Louisa May Alcott, Charlotte Perkins Gilman). They may have been LGBTQ authors in a time when that was illegal or dangerous (Oscar Wilde). They may have experienced substantial poverty (Dickens, Stephen King) or had struggles with addiction (Stephen King, Poe). They may be authors of color (Toni Morrison, Victor LeValle, Octavia Butler, Tananarive Due, Helen Oyeyemi) or may simply have experienced difficulties working in mainstream society (H.P. Lovecraft). |