Gothic Literature: An Overview | Ronald Paulson (Essay Date Autumn 1981)
RONALD PAULSON (ESSAY DATE AUTUMN 1981)
SOURCE: Paulson, Ronald. "Gothic Fiction and the French Revolution." ELH 48, no. 3 (autumn 1981): 532-54.
In the following essay, Paulson examines the Gothic novel's connection to the French Revolution in terms of the treatment of rebellion and sexuality in such works as The Monk, Northanger Abbey, and Frankenstein.
In Chapter 5, Volume II, of Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey Henry Tilney regales Catherine Morland with his version of the Gothic fantasy she loves to read. When she arrives at Northanger Abbey, he says, she will be taken by the housekeeper "along many gloomy passages, into an apartment never used since some cousin or kin died in it about twenty years before."1 She will discover that the door has no lock, and shortly (a couple of nights later) there will be a violent storm. "Peals of thunder so loud as to seem to shake the edifice...
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