The Gothic Genre :: Literature

Throughout the late ordinal century, and now into the twenty-first, critics have expressed growing anxiety about the foxy boundaries of the Gothic genre. (Rintoul 701)The capacity of the Gothic to survive, and particularly to interbreed with other visionary modes so as to engender much to a greater extent complex and important literary phenomena than itself, was extraordinary. (Moynahan 110)Overview of the Gothic NovelThe Gothic novel is said to boasting in disrupted, oppressed, or undeveloped societies, to give a voice to the helpless and unenfranchised and therefore often carries a heavily political or metapolitical manoeuver (Moynahan 111). For this reason, particular groups of writers, such as women (Ellis 48) and Anglo-Irish people (Moynahan 111), were often associated with the genre. While the race between Anglo-Irish writers and their usage of Gothic conventions may be related to the geological formation of the genre of the national tale, it may be less clear why and how women employed the genre. Although it is uncertain whether women actually did participate in reading more Gothic novels than men did the Gothic romance in particular has massive been associated with women. The other major genre associated with women at the time -- the novel of sensitivity -- may actually be understood by some scholars as being in conflict with the genre of the Gothic. Patricia Meyer Spacks, for instance, purports that the relationship between sublimity and aesthesia presents real complications...and while Gothic novels typically attempt sublimity, they rely heavily on sensibility instead (198-199). As sites of contradiction and contentment in this regard, and with the great trend of female Gothic writers, it is unsurprising that the genre became the site of a earnest and, at times, bitter debate about the nature and politics of muliebrity (Ellis 48).The Children of the Abbey as a Gothic NovelI would like to suggest that the Gothic romance is a way of reinsc ribing the basic Pamela situation, in which a young lady is cut off from the controlling and protecting bias of her parents, is threatened (in life, limb, and virtue) by a villain partly by ingenuous fortune and partly by the skillful use of her own native resources, the young lady is ultimately able to overcome and surmount the threat and is rewarded by being married to a young man of cheeseparing family, wealth, and ethical standing.