ABSTRACT
Gothic is transgressive. It has always been, ever since it came into existence as a genre in the eighteenth century. While today Gothic has moved from being regarded as ‘merely’ a genre into a mode that can and has been applied to various kinds of works (in Wolfgang Iser’s broad sense), it has remained transgressive – or potentially become even more so. However, the forms of transgression we find in the Gothic vary greatly, depending on time, geographical location, social, political, and religious contexts, to mention just a few. While we might find few instances in which the Gothic actually violates the law, it more often than not contravenes social rules and the dicta of normativity. Gothic aesthetics and particularly Gothic excesses often go against the grain and provide an outlet for social and cultural anxieties, which are negotiated within the realm of the fantastic or the supernatural, abandoning realism for the sake of a Gothic aesthetic that breaks away from reason in favour of emotion. The Gothic gives voice to ambiguities and anxieties without resolving them into certainties; instead, it positions itself as “part of an internalised world of guilt, anxiety, despair, a world of individual transgression interrogating the uncertain bounds of imaginative freedom and human knowledge” (Botting 10).
