ABSTRACT
Even before Gothic criticism became academically fashionable, those very critics who helped establish it as a valuable scholarly pursuit recognized the moral implications of the Gothic novel. According to these early Gothic critics, since the Gothic novel exposes the basic traits of human nature that are skirted in more "polite" fiction, it, as a subgenre, is steeped in moral ambiguity. The vast majority of eighteenth-century Gothic novels never explicitly labeled themselves Gothic, and most critics never termed them "Gothic novel". Even though the Gothic satirists display their own interest here as creators of fiction, they too feel that realistic novels possess some virtue and that Gothic romances provide only a moral danger. If Ann Radcliffe's work is to be considered a type of feminine Gothic relying on terror as its mode of introducing sublimity into its narrative, and if Matthew Lewis's novel is to be considered a masculine Gothic relying on horror, one must take the question of sexual difference.
