apsantonia08′s Blog

Hi, I’ve stolen Elen’s blog background because it’s the only way I can figure out to have the subscribe button.. Sorry about that Elen, I’ll change it back as soon as I stop being quite so computer illiterate.

Gothic poetry, as opposed to gothic prose, has several conventions of its own, involving rhyming structure, language and rhythm. ‘La belle dame sans merci,’ John Keats, and ‘The raven,’ Edgar Allen Poe, are two examples of gothic poetry with very rigid rhyming structures. ‘The raven’ has rhymes throughout, both in the middle of lines and the ends; every single stanza ends with ‘more.’ Similarly, in ‘La belle dame sans merci,’ the second line of every stanza rhymes with the last all the way through. Something that sets gothic poetry aside from gothic prose is the heavy use of language features such as repetition and alliteration to build tension and create ‘sound effects,’ for example by emulating the sound of wind. In ‘The raven,’ the line, ‘And the silken sad uncertain rustling of each purple curtain…’ uses sibilance, creating a creepy atmosphere. Repetition is used in both poems to build tension and fear. The rhythm in both poems is very regular most of the way through, with the use of dashes to brake down the structure in places, building an uneasy sense of disturbance and tension.

I’m up to chapter 5 in Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights. So far, it has adhered to the traditions of gothic literature in several ways, including the presence of a stranger arriving in a secluded and isolated place, and a great deal of mystery surrounding a family and their home. The most overtly gothic passages have been descriptions of nightmares and dreams, demonstrating the gothic genre’s preoccupation with the subconscious. One of these describes the narrator’s terror as a ghostly girl tries to come through the window; ‘…and stretching an arm out to seize the importunate branch; instead of which, my fingers closed on the fingers of a little, ice-cold hand! The intense horror of nightmare came over me: I tried to draw back my arm, but the hand clung to it, and a most melancholy voice sobbed, “let me in—let me in!”’

   To my understanding, the Gothic is a genre influenced by Romanticism and the ‘Graveyard’ school of poetry, involving common themes of fear, death, love and the ucanny. My first impression of the Gothic is that I’m unlikely to enjoy any strictly Gothic texts such as ‘The castle of Ontranto’ or ‘The Monk.’ Instead, I think I’ll go for texts with some Gothic features, but more loosley based on the Gothic model such as ‘Jane Eyre’ and ‘The Wasp Factory’.