Karen Blixen - Isak Dinesen home

Question 15: The Meaning of the term "Gothic" in literature?

Q. I am teaching Gothic Literature for the first time and will be using Isak Dinesen's "The Monkey", "The Deluge at Norderney" and perhaps one more (maybe "The Dreamers"). Students will have already read Poe's "The Raven", "The Masque of the Red Death", and "The Tell-Tale Heart," and at least two selections from 12 Gothic Tales. Do you have any suggestions on how to present Isak Dinesen to the class? Sources they should be aware of? Although this is a 12th grade college prep class, many students' reading and writing ablities are limited. They will do a mini-research paper as well as a reflective essay on Gothic Literature.

A. There is an article titled "Why Gothic Tales" in Diana's Revenge by Marianne Jul and Bo Hakon Jorgensen (Odense University Press, 1985). This article (pp. 126-138) discusses the Gothic novel in general, and also as it applies to Isak Dinesen. The article also appears in Isak Dinesen: Critical Views (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1993).

Robert Langbaum, in his ground-breaking analysis of Isak Dinesen's work, Isak Dinesen's Art: The Gayety of Vision, does not spend much time on the discussion of "Gothic," per se. He does say the following:

1.)"the speakers are creating for each other a world different from and better than the ordinary world around them." (p.73)

2.) "Isak Dinesen is not a writer of hair-raising tales. Her stories are fantastic in the way wit is--in the jubilant freedom with which possibilities are stretched and ideas combined...." She "sets the story in the atmosphere of the imagination where life can be explored in depth." (p.89)

3.) "the lines of art versus nature--with the Gothic tale on the side of art: witty, extravagant, cosmopolitan; and the Winter's Tale, Danish, provincial, natural." (pp.89-90)

4.) Pellegrina Leoni in "The Dreamers" lacks a shadow, creating "the existential horror we feel for a freak." (p.100)

In a later work, The Poetry of Experience (New York: Random House, 1974), Langbaum notes:
"Such an arrangement pits the hero against the opposite abstraction, thus opening the way for a new kind of allegory in which villain and heroine represent conflicting aspects of the hero’s self with the hero’s problem to reconcile his internal conflict through self-development. The allegory is operative, however, only to the extent that the play is, like Faust, Cain and Manfred, a monodrama—to the extent that only one character is unequivocally actual, with the incidents and the other characters existing as occasions for his self-expression and self-development, as a means of objectifying an essentially internal action" (pp. 63-64).

Sara Stambaugh, professor of English at the University of Alberta, writes an article called "British Sources and Isak Dinesen's Conception of the Gothic." This article is too pedantic for 12th graders, but it offers the following:

1.)Elizabeth McAndrew says that Gothic tales contain a "flagrant, all-pervading symbolism...Beneath the surface fiction there is a probing of humanity's basic psychological forces."

2.)David Punter says that writers of Gothic tales are "fellow practitioners of a literary mode in which characters exist largely to embody ideas and passions..."

3.)Stambaugh says "Victorians look at the world symbolically and read physical manifestations as figurations of deeper truths."

An informal essay on the meaning of "Gothic" in literature can be found at this link: http://www.geocities.com/Hollywood/Chateau/8780/GothicLitera.html

The essay discusses the typical aspects of Gothic stories, including their association with dreams and the subconscious, ruinous and convoluted medieval architecture as emblem of the inner aspects of the mind, and the  common themes of rape,incest, and other uncontrolled passions. The supernatural serves as a symbol for suppressed guilt and terror of the inexpressible. The genre was invented by the English writer Robert Walpole (1717-1797) in his novel The Castle of Otranto.

A later Gothic novel, The Monk by Gregory Mathew Lewis (1775-1818), was no doubt the inspiration for Karen Blixen's "The Monkey," including the priory as setting, the story's themes of incest and rape, and the underlying emphasis on sexual obsession which turns the Prioress into something inhuman--a monkey.

Any discussion of Gothic literature should include a review of Coleridge's "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner," a classic in the Gothic genre and a work known to have been discussed by Karen Blixen and Denys Finch Hatton.

Copyright © 2002 by Linda Donelson MD. All rights reserved