ABSTRACT
One of the powerful images conjured up by the words ‘gothic novel’ is that of a shadowy form rising from a mysterious place: Frankenstein’s monster rising from the laboratory table, Dracula creeping from his coffin, or, more generally, the slow opening of a crypt to reveal a dark and obscure figure. In general, the gothic has been associated with a rebellion against a constraining neoclassical aesthetic ideal of order and unity, in order to recover a suppressed primitive and barbaric imaginative freedom. The developmental model plays an important part both in critical discussions of the rise of the gothic and in the novels themselves. Criticism has often focused on the gothic’s fragmentation as a response to bourgeois models of personal, sexual, and textual identity, seeing it as a Frankensteinian deconstruction of modern ideology. The gothic was seen as encouraging a particularly intimate and insidious relationship between text and reader, by making the reader identify with what he or she read.
