Colonial and postcolonial Gothic

Abstract

Land in a swamp, march through the woods, and in some inland post feel the savagery, the utter savagery, had closed round him – all that mysterious life of the wilderness that stirs in the forest, in the jungles, in the hearts of wild men. Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness The Gothic - as Walter Scott observed in his commentary on Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto - is above all the “art of exciting surprise and horror.” The genre’s appeal to readers, in Scott’s view, comes from its trying to reach “that secret and reserved feeling of love for the marvelous and supernatural which occupies a hidden corner in almost everyone’s bosom.” As it happens, this “literature of nightmare” (MacAndrew, Gothic Tradition in Fiction , p. 3) was, from its earliest history in England and Europe, fundamentally linked to colonial settings, characters, and realities as frequent embodiments of the forbidding and frightening. This mixed genre was still less than forty years old when Charlotte Smith – the eighteenth-century poet and novelist admired by so many in her time, including Jane Austen – set her novella “The Story of Henrietta” (1800) in the Blue Mountains of Jamaica, where the terrors of the heroine’s situation are exacerbated by her atavistic fears of Jamaica’s African-derived magicoreligious practice of Obeah and the possibility of sexual attack by black males. By the 1790s Gothic writers were quick to realize that Britain’s growing empire could prove a vast source of frightening “others” who would, as replacements for the villainous Italian antiheroes in Walpole or Radcliffe, bring freshness and variety to the genre. With the inclusion of the colonial, a new sort of darkness – of race, landscape, erotic desire and despair – enters the Gothic genre, and I here want to show and explain the consequences of that “invasion” throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

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