| The Gothic novel can hardly be considered "Gothic" without the familiar landscapes of crumbling castles, dark forests, and sinister convents/monasteries. The Gothic environment emerged as a literary trope with the 1764 publication of Horace Walpole's seminal novel, The Castle of Otranto. Because the later Gothic novel borrowed so heavily upon the setting of Walpole's novel, the Gothic landscape is usually dismissed as a mere convention---nothing more than an author's trick to establish mood and create suspense. A more careful reading of these texts suggests, however, that the landscape is more than a trope. The Mysteries of Udolpho, for example, spends more actual page time in description of setting than in plot progression. In fact, the heroine's travel time to Udolpho far surpasses her time spent within Udolpho itself, suggesting, perhaps, that the outdoor spaces are just as "Gothic" as the ancestral castle, and therefore, just as important to the progression of the Gothic novel.;One way in which the novelists employ landscape is to convey the author's own views towards the Gothic. Novelists like Ann Radcliffe and Matthew "Monk" Lewis, for instance, use these spaces as intentional settings for scenes of both romance and violence. In my dissertation, I study the environments of the Gothic novel, particularly the spaces where violence and sexual acts take place, and attempts to prove that these outdoor spaces are manipulated by these authors in a meaningful way. I also examine how that meaning changes in the different sub-genres of Male and Female Gothic and British and American Gothic, in an attempt to break down these binaries. By deconstructing such binaries, understudies tropes of the Gothic genre are able to be re-examined without the weight of artificial theoretical constraints. The purpose in this dissertation, then, is twofold: (1) to take apart the traditional theoretical constructs that define the Gothic in order to make way for (2) an examination of the understudied landscape descriptions that appear throughout the Gothic novels of the 1790's. |
