The word "Gothic" implies sinister, supernature, and horror!!! It also represents the medieval style buildings, the sacret architecture dedicated to the glory of God!
It's also the word coined by Italian artists of Renassainse as an insult to decribe anything that is not from the civilized world like Rome or Greek but the things that are of its gloomy, wild, barbaric nature, and those cathedules and churches that are primitive and worthless!!!
Nevertheless, Gothic art produces the most medieval churches to us!
It contains and splits into two parts: the mission of heaven and the mourning of hell!!! It represents the catholic superstitions as well.
Till the Georgians, during which peroid it's assumed that every man should have his own castle, had emerged the new literatury, paintings, taste of terror and wildness in science, thus marking the midnight moment of British Gothic history!!!
During this great age of change, Gothic whispered the deepest desires, the darkest fears through those architectures, paintings, and works of novels.
《The Castle Of Otranto》(published in 1764) by Horace Walpole is regarded as the first Gothic novel published. This novel, a story about a Lord who was cursed by dark deeds of his ancient ancestors and finally outwitted the curse and defeated the evil, contains everything in Gothic: the haunted castle, villains under some nameless lust, and the horror fantasy. It made readers swormed and the pulses raised!!!
The author of this then-sensational novel, the son of the first PM with the educational background of Edon and afterwards Cambridge published it in annonym due to the environment at that time took Gothic as the fiction of shame!!! With such establishment, many Gothic authors wanted to be disappear!!!
The main character of this novel is the castle itself which incidates the Georgian psycho.
Well, Walpole built a castle in Gothic style for himself in Strewberry Hill(outside the circle of London), which, unlike any other building of his day, expressed the theatrical reinterpretation of the past. But the castle has its playful and subversive side too (those gilded ceilings and decrations and extened collection of art pieces) to show the refined Gothic style. It's light-hearted but darely conventional.
Walpole,not a marrying kind himself, was fond of men!!! He had an inapproperiate affair with his nephew just before his book being in shape!
His novel was based on his dream which reflected his denuded nature!!!
The 18th century was the age of Reason.
Aristocrats claimed everything oposite to Gothic. They thought powerful people built grand country houses. They built Stone House with huge columns with clean lines of imported style which embodies the value of ancient Greeks and the power of ancient Rome, yet being surrounded by crumpling history and catholic churches!!!
In this age of contrast between light and dark, order and liberty, virture and vice, as the universal always has another side. Gothic provided us lots of art, architectures, and the way of life.
Lord Corben, who designed the grand stone house, had another architecture for us. The Corben's folly, a stone temple of liberty, embodies his pride of his Anglo-saxon origin. Its whimsical Gothic towers, eccentrical medieval novalty designed to decorate the exporing country's days.
Well, the building was decayed. Its ivy clay ruin look makes it look like it had been decayed for centries.
Since 1747, Love of ruins became the cult--the cult of nature; the firm, limited, freedom of believe of a powerful group of men.
The new taste of Gothic--the ruins in the landscape forstered the new approach to the natural world.
Britain and Italy were commuted across the Alps for centuries. In 18th century, people started to admire these mountains, waterfalls, cliffs, and called them "the sublime"(first claimed by Edward Burke)! And the sublime nature was best observed in distance, and enjoyed in awe and in dread, especially in paintings. Thay started to see old paintings as fresh.
《The Travellers》, the 《Storm》 by Turner.
Salvatore Rosa, the Italian painter who died long before his work was bought and shipped as many as those Englishmen could by boat to England, had his masterpiece--《Witches》(1646)hang on the wall of the National Gallery of England. The painting, those monstrous figures and flesh and the free thought of horror, implies that the true nature is died the moment it's discovered by human!!!
On the other hand, the Georgians also dig their literary past.
Here came the William Shakespear, the almost forgotten writter. His plays are full of supernature and strangeness. The 《Tempest》,《Hamlet》,《Macbeth》, and 《The Midnight Dream》. They answer the need for magical or visionary thirst.
Geogerns republished them in gallery, by painting, through festivals as if Shakespear's language sprung from the soil of old England, and so people could hear, see, touch, and smell the lost world of Middleages!!!
The reason why Shakespear can exert such a powerful hold is his irregular and he broke all the rules: he turned comedy into tragedy; tregedy into comedy. He is no man's servent. He is his own master who inspires 18th century's melancholy in the imagination and lamenting all been lost during the reformation.
1721, the poem《A Night Piece On Dead》by the Irish writter Thomas Parnell reminded us that apart from the importance of knowledge we need to raise the question of "what it is to die"!!!
He and his poems let the so-called "the graveyard poets and writters" who conveyed the sober moral massage about the dead emerge. Such as Robert Blair's 《the Grave》
In the mid 18th century, Gothic has past the mutating in painting. It spoke the unspeakable--secret thoughts comes before secret deeds.
1781, 《The Nightmare》, by Swizland born Huseley, dismiss the meanless nouncance. Its image is endlessly borrowed till this day. His another piece, also indicating murky intentions and basing on fevered imagination without any trace of history and story behind, sit more appropriate in vault instead of on the wall. The imagination is the only source and the expressive grand objective truth--the suggestive fear!!! It's so avidly that some take it as the jewelry, others smell the rats from it.
1777 was the year of the Chatterton forgery first published. A boy obsessed by dusted medieval documents named Chaterten closet himself in a church attic and forged a book or manuscrip of 15th century monks. As a doomed young boy, he might began as the harmlessart but he ended up in Gothic horror--committing suicide at the age of 17.
It's William Thomas Backford, the son of Major of London, who pushed Gothic east to the aribic world of Turkey. It all started at the party when he was 21 years old. He seduced a 13-year-old boy. Then, this scandal and his self-emposed excile for 10 years produced the《Vathic》. At 31, he came back and devoted himself into building a tower or epitefas proclaiming his unrelenting pride and unique and madness, but callapsed at its own weight afterwards when it only reached 1/10 of its height.
The last 10 years of 18th century was the boom time for Gothic literature which boasting the moral lessons both low on sermerning and high on thrill or terror!!!
Ann Redcliffe, another Gothic writter, ,whose works were seen as the rude, lude, sedicious, dangerious especially to young girls who were embedded in those books then.
Jane Austin's 《Northanger Abby》(1798) forced the Gothic genie back into the bottle. She conveyed the massage that why worry about Gothic terror when there were more challenges in real life which had been already quite hard to deal with!!!
Gothic got its huge boost from just accross the ocean--the French Revolution!!!
Gothic was no longer read in ink but in blood. People were afraid of the French invasion.
The England's Gorya, draw lots of cartoons to highlight the political turndown, the killing machine, etc.
At the height of this terror, Mathew Lewis, only 19 years old then, wrote the 《Monk》. It's a vision of hell. It set free human passion from constrained order. It's about sex transgrassion. At the end of the novel, in the echo of the French Revolution, the monks burned the church. The Gothic said what can not be said in other languages!!!
Gothic started as a paperthin flame or the little fireball in the 18th century, and grew into the bonefire in the 19th century.
II. The City And The Soul
At the 19th century dawned, the fear and anxiety deepened. The revolution in science and in industry distoried the social order and threaten the moral oblivion. The landscape transformed and urbanized. Britain was the battlefield where two opposing Gothic forces contended: on the bright side was the idealistic dreams of revival of the architecture; on the dark side was the Gothic horror and nightmare due to the fear on anxiety and alienation. As the wonder world came into shape, the dark side gained the uphand.
In the late 18th century, science was mapping and neighbouring the land. It's also the dawn of industural revolution and the time of the collective crisis of identity in those Victoria cities that were full of slums and sewages.
1768 was the year Joseph Wright of Derby painted the 《Experiment On A Bird In A Airpump》. An episode of enlightment.
The whole thing is the focus on the lit. Spectrally, it's a hunted house; a strange form of Gothic horror; the modern priest; and the question is: Is God killed by science?
Is the science benevelant? Is it the new fear, terror, scene of darkness? Have God been killed by science? It's the tension between the old faith of mystery and the new age of reason.
Other paintings share the same idea from Joseph: A painting of a skeleton rising from a grave. A natural philosopher pondering the question of life and death.
On the development of science in the 19th century: pioneer flights acrossed the English Channel; the mystery of electricity sparked the life itself; the steaming locamotive; the anatomy, etc
Marry Shelley, the wife of Shelly the poet when she was 17 and he was 22, and a Gothic writter herself, lived in London at the heart of matropolis, and created the 《Frankenstan》!!! The progress and danger come with it. And it still can shiver the spine today.
It's also draw upon the famous experiments with the attempt to revive corpes of animals and human beings from decay by powerful electrical currents.
The scientist in this novel only concentrates on the realization of his dream but not the consequenses. That sparks the killing spree of revenge from Frankenstan who, later, learns to speak and says to his creator:"I should be your Adam but now the falling Angel!!!"
The novel expresses the deep-seated 18th century terror that Science might run out of control!!!
The point is: the bearbones of scientific inquiry are not enough, and they have to be elemented by the spirit of moral responsibility!!!
The another fear of this period is: Mapping God out of the equation.
Diagram left little space for spiritual dimention in the microspectrum world.
There is a little painting from William Blake who created his own monster--《The Ghost Of Flee》: the depiction of a man being transformed into a fleat as a punishment of the blood-thirsty nature. An image can be found among those sjlptures on the rooves of Gothic churches. The image is indicating Ourselves!!! William was using the image of Gothic to revenge the science. The questions were raised: Who are we? Is the consciousness the evidence of our soul or the chemical reaction of the brain?
In the early 19th century, mind control was seen as the more sinister and the more Gothic.
As science explored the horizen of knowledge, so art followed.
Samule Taylor, one of the the romantic poets, took Gothic horror to the high seas and to the depth of human psychy.
《The Haunted Journey Of A Doomed Sailor》is the metorpher for searching of the troubled mind. When nature condemn him, he just has to roam the earth and suffers psychological torment of guilt and alienation.
The more we pindown the eccentrical nature of who we are, the more it evaprates like the mist at the sea! We are at the consistancy of change.
The terrifying of the unknowing led people turn to drugs-- Opium is the door to the subconciousness.
Thomas De Quincy's 《The Confession Of An English Opium Eater》revealed that the opium turns the whole mind into a Gothic fantacy machine. People wanted to escape. Drugs feuls the escaped fantacies, or namely, escaping your problem by taking drugs. Just take the drugs, and close your eyes and take the trip to the hell and back again.
Turner, in 1844, put the pace of change and the sense of awe was captured on canvas--a painting of locomotive or a train.
The train was travelling so fast in the Victoria England. The train brought factories and cities. But the terror lived in the heart of Victoria England--the urbanization.
England was changing and experienting the transformation from a rural countryside into industral economy. People were flocking into the cities. It happened very quickly infew decades. London became the city of crime. With the huge smoke hovering the cities, the landscape of future is urban and its territory the whole range of anxiety.
The new form of literiture was in form. Novels like 《Spring-healed Jack》,《Life In The Criminal Class》,《Vampire》are full demonstrations of Gothic language and images.
Charles Dickens' novels express his Gothic is about the gloom of the industry of here and now. The Gothic castle is London itself where fog is creeping across every surface, and where is full of lost souls and porvety sucking the blood of the city. A place full of darkness ypu can bearly see your hands. It's no need of imagination. You are living in it. eg: 《Bleak House》
One man's anxiety is another man's opportunity.
John Martin,1851, the painting《The Great Day Of The End Of The World》is literally a Gothic painting: the doomed day, the last judgement, a painting predicted a Hollywood blockbuster in which everything is about to go wrong, a city assuming itself in flame, a smelling furnace. One could thrill to the terror to its own and only reassure himself that it's just a nightmare!
On the other hand, the Gothic optimism which is full of colour, pageantry, chivalry was riding to the rescue. The costume balls, banquets, play-acting were expressing the medieval spirits. "Fantacy of escaping from the presence into the idealized past."
《I Vanhoe》
1839, the tournament of jostling was held by the Earl of Ablinton in Scotland. Dur to the wet weather that day, it's called the Night With The Umberella and it's reserved till this day.
Augustus Pugin, the author of 《Contrasts》in which he compared the architectures then and ones before then. It' subject is modern city and its ill. He pointed out that the modern ones were bad; the Gothic ones were good. The modern ones, the factories and the chimneys, were soulless, barren, industrous, commercial, impersonal places. The medieval ones where men were going to daily business under the eye of God guarded by towering churches and everything was in order and tranquil were good.
1834, the great fire cost almost all the city and burned the city to the ground and was called the flame of distruction.
While the new Parliment building was commitioned to Pugin who designed it in medieval details from outside and in. His spectacular design of Gothic details infertrating in tiles, ceilings, and windows. The Camber of the House of Lords is the best example and the crown of them all. Its absessive profusion of details, the gold, gild throne, turns this place of political debate into a secular church, and stamps Gothic on the preceeding of political life and stamps the moral vision on the decision makers. But it's a place easy to forget all the problems, a place that is indifferent to the present problems and makes you lost yourself into the glorious past.
To 150 miles in North stands St. John's Church in Stanfordshire which was finished in 1840. You can feel that Britain could be saved through bricks and vaults and rich decorations. He squeezed the entire Christin and all Gothic elements of colours, paterns, designs into one building.
Pugin lived in an age of controdictions. He stood for the bright side of Githic but ended at the dark side. He drove himself into madness and died at the age of 40.
1861, at 52, the Prince Albert died. Victoria,the grieve-stricken widdow, plunged into mourning. She wore in black for 40 years. She took the picture with Albert's marble bast and she layout his cloth everyday as he was still with her everyday. She commanded a memorial for Albert and she won after 10 years of battle of bargaining the budget.
The statue puts two forces of Gothic into one piece: the tramphant of British progress and speaks the language of lost, mourning, and grievement. It embraces the future but reminds us we can not forget the past.
During Victoria time, railway stations, bridges, school buildings, museums are the jem of late Victoria architecture.
1885, on the fringe of London, Thomas Holloway, a devotee of Pugin's idea, established a building in Gothic style with its purpose of confinment--the lunitic assylum, a place of poinigent.
The building was with the purpose of stability, order, wellness. But could Gothic actually heal? No! In the end, instead of curing the inflicted, it reduced to a dumping ground for problem people. There were bunch of people full of fear of failure in a meant-to-be place of hope.
The sign:"Call no man happy till you know his end!" is on the wall. In late 20th century, it was closed.
There were two forces of Gothic: the passivism represented by Frankansten, the Bleak House, the Olium Eater; and the idealism led by Pugines and those who followed himseeks the way towards the happy land of Gothis revival.
The winner???
The host's view is that the bad dreams stood the test of the time better than the well-meaning fantacies. Because the more imagination, the more bites!!!
III. Blood For Sale--Gothic Goes Global
Gothic began with the desire to revive, something that was dead as the style of Medieval architecture, but it grows like graveyard ivy, mkre sinister at every twist of time. By the mid 19th century, Gothic spred at every directions: Gothic paintings which were of fear and phobia, Gothic novels which were dread. Into the 20th century, Gothic is everywhere. It's in our TVs, books, technologies, films, music, fashion and beyond. Even there are gosts in the machines.
It takes all ways to Bram Stoker's 《Dracula》published in 1890.
The house that Dracula drawlled is called the "carfacts" which is from the French word indicating the four-faced house. This Dracula's domain is located in Whitby, Yolkshire town.
Dracula has two functions: on the backwards, it is the classic novel full of groomy hunted castles amd dungins; on the forwards, it's infutrating into our own time, in films, TVs, comics; it infused our culture.
Dracula is elusive and it evokes plague, famine, and even computer virus as if we are stalked by a monster who takes posassion of our collective imagination and the stalker kept its tail chilly simple. We are under his darkness.
In late 19th century, the 《Das Capital》by Karl Marx.
Ther is a monster in the market.
Capital is deadly labour which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labour and it lives the more, the more labour it sucks. It drains every drop of the labour's blood at every minute of the working hour. So time is money. The clock of market is ticking because of the production, whoch in turn is ticked by the labour. On the other hand, the vampire is also in the comsumption side. The shopping, the commordities displayed in the windows and in advertisments and commercials are the vampire that sucks the victims' blood. Commordity is the voodo economy. It's fatish. Gothic without Marx is like vampire eithout blood.
It is William Morris, the first Englishman to read 《Das Capital》. An artist, designer, and an idealist he is, he has his own gilded covered 《Das Capital》copy. No. 499 Oxford street was where he sold wallpapers.
As he grew older, he began to get his hand in things like politics and he did lobby and git lots followers.
He helped the publishment of 《The Nature Of Gothic》which was written by John Ruskin, an art critics. In the book Ruskin pointed the industry was the blight. Every young lady who bought beans engaged in slave trade.
No 7, Hamsmith terrace was the place where these closed men gathered and discussed an ideal world surrounded by man made articrafts.
1870, William Batterfield built the school in Oxford college in very Gothic style in the image of medieval town. But it's the final flowering fashion that soon be cut off.
The vampire in mid 19th century resided in trains, steam engines, and even i our recreational machines.
1913, 15 years after the first Morris died, there was a second Morris who set his car factory near Oxford. He, later, designed the streamline which was adopted by Ford in his american Ford car factory. 100 years later, robots emerges, and human power is replaced by Frankenstan monsters.
The new media, including phones, cameras, typewriters, is the leading part in Gothic history.
Then, the sound recorderbecame the another version of vampire.
In 1890s, cinema, the utimate Gothic haunted house, pepelled the Dracula to the world.
1927, Alfred Hichcock started making his horror films. The return of the repressed. Soon he went to Hollywood and the Psycho, Rabacca, etc. followed.
《Heart Of Darkness》by Joseph Conrad tells the story of black slaves and African workers and their lives on the river in Congo. The book plunges readers into a lybrith where the darkness lives in the center. A story told in distortion.
Conrad thinks the Gothic is not just a genre but a way of thinking and seeing.
Ruskin's Gothic weights on horrofied, distorted images in which men's minds are dim. For him the mirror of our perseption is misted by the breath of Satan. When the grotesque comes in, it cleans the mirror. The image maybe terrifing but we can see it, and we can see the truth.
1895 《Time Machine》shows that we are de-evolve instead evolve, we are re-gressing instead aggressing.
TS. Eliot's 《The Wastland》was done after the WW II . It's about the personal crisis due to his marriage problem.
Fransic Bacon's paintings are full of snarling mouth, body in the basement, and blood everywhere.
This is rooted in Ireland!!!
In the Ireland Gallery in Dublin, his little studio is a Gothic cript among the textbook Neo Classical art style.
Ireland is the center of Gothic where it was born, kicking and screaming.
Charles Mecheras' 《Mill of The Wonderland》tells a man sold his soul to the devil can be crowned as the first Gothic novel. 《Carmiller》, astory about a lysbin vampire later was adopted in a film. Osca Wild's 《A Picture Of D》is about a man is haunted by a protrait which predicts his decay. And WB. Yeats' poems.
What a fertile ground for Gothic!!!
In a word, Gothic is in our mind!!!
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