The Transformation of Gothic Conventions in the (Proto)Modernist Text

Abstract

The purpose of the present essay is to demonstrate the ways in which gothic conventions are transformed and modified in the modernist text. In particular, it focuses on Joseph Conrad’s proto-modernist novella Heart of Darkness that paved the way for gothic modernism.

 The formation of the gothic traditions begins with the publication of the first Gothic novel, Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764). The gothic tradition was shaped by the conventions that were subject to numerous transformations by different literary movements at different times. Needless to say, they underwent experimentation and modification/s within the framework of conceptual-aesthetic paradigm of modernism.

The range of the modifications of what can be categorized or defined as the Gothic in literature is so wide that it is practically impossible to provide its exhaustive classification. Therefore, the whatness of the gothic in literature is still hotly debated in literary scholarship.  There are many different, sometimes conflicting and mutually exclusive, opinions on certain problematic issues concerning the gothic tradition.

The gothic or horror novel is a kind of reaction to the ideas of the "age of reason", an expression of the crisis of Enlightenment. Gothic fiction is associated with the Romantic movement which emphasized intense emotional experience often in a wild and scary, bizarre setting. Gothic literature emphasizes the dark side of human existence such as horror and death. In many novels and stories that we categorize as gothic the environment plays a crucial role. Gothic romance is usually characterized by the unique fusion of the fantasy and reality, ordinary and extraordinary, tragic and comic, natural and supernatural, bizarre and commonplace. The plot is complex puzzle, a kind of labyrinth intriguing and perplexing the reader’s mind. The motives of the "cursed family," supernatural/mysterious phenomena, revenge, death, alienation, pervert sexuality and incest are widely used in gothic fiction.

Gothic prose as an important precursor of romanticism focuses on the conflicts between the natural and the supernatural, mysticism and the material world, religion and science, death and life, tyranny and the oppressed, the enslaving socio-political system and the free individual, the hierarchy and individualism, authoritarianism and liberalism. Fusing real with fictional and supernatural with natural, it gives rise to the imaginative realism. Dreams, nightmares, phantasmagorical visions, hallucinations, the interweaving of folk narratives and reality are integral constituents of the gothic realm.

Joseph Conrad as a pre-modernist author paves the way for gothic modernism by intentionally modifying conventional language and idiom of the literary gothic. In his novella Heart of Darkness the monsters, ghosts and monstrous supernatural beings of traditional gothic literature are transformed into an alternative version of the narrativization of history which was previously repressed by the authorized version of history. They turn into immaterial figures that remain in the periphery of our consciousness.

Conrad anticipates cultural, political, and aesthetic dimensions of modernism not only by questioning the past but by drawing as well on a wealth of cultural material and precursor genres rooted in the gothic tradition. Gothic modernism as shaped by Conrad presents multiple perspectives on thematically disparate yet culturally intertwined issues such as ethnicity and espionage, consciousness and electricity, formalism and sensation, and homosexuality and tourism. The novella, psychological exploration of the horrors of empire set in the Congo, is full of gothic imagery and symbolism. As an early or proto-modernist writer Conrad moves away from the gothic traditions as well as Edwardian writing conventions and towards the experimentations associated with the modernist movement.