tag:theconversation.com,2011:/us/topics/gothic-15356/articlesGothic – The Conversation2023-10-26T16:41:46Ztag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2125632023-10-26T16:41:46Z2023-10-26T16:41:46ZFive works of Welsh gothic literature you should read this Halloween<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/555845/original/file-20231025-21-tg409h.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=60%2C0%2C6720%2C4446&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Celebrate Nos Galan Gaeaf with some Welsh gothic fiction. </span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/stack-old-books-vintage-book-on-1870101415">zef art/Shutterstock</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Wales has sought to rediscover its identity and autonomy since the <a href="https://senedd.wales/how-we-work/history-of-devolution/">devolution</a> referendum of 1997. Authors and publishers have embraced the gothic genre as a means of exploring Welsh language, culture and heritage – reflecting on the anxieties Welsh society has experienced since becoming a devolved nation. </p>
<p>Halloween (or <em><a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/bitesize/articles/zbkdcqt">Nos Galan Gaeaf</a></em>, as we say in Wales) presents the perfect opportunity for us to explore these social tensions through the macabre.</p>
<p>Here are five eerie works of Welsh literature for you to catch up with this spooky season. </p>
<h2>Ghostbird by Carol Lovekin (2016)</h2>
<p>In a little Welsh village filled with magic, Cadi Hopkins is on a mission to find herself and learn the truth about what happened to her father and sister. But it’s not long before ghosts appear, and Cadi and her mother learn they have to confront their fears. </p>
<p>Inspired by <a href="https://www.britannica.com/topic/Mabinogion">Welsh mythology</a>, <a href="https://www.honno.co.uk/books/ghostbird">Ghostbird</a> by Carol Lovekin has the perfect balance of ghost story and magical realism. Lovekin explores themes of identity, mother-daughter relationships, female empowerment and Welsh culture. Think the fantasy film <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0120791/">Practical Magic</a> meets Wales.</p>
<h2>Dead Relatives and Other Stories by Lucie McKnight Hardy (2021)</h2>
<p>In the opening story of this <a href="https://deadinkbooks.com/product/dead-relatives/">collection</a> of short stories, Iris, a young girl, resides in a big country house with her mother and their servants. But when the Ladies arrive, Iris’ dead relatives begin to stir.</p>
<p>This latest work by Lucie McKnight Hardy deals with themes of motherhood, small town anxieties and weird traditions. It’s the perfect option for those who may not have time to read a whole novel. </p>
<h2>The Great God Pan by Arthur Machen (1894)</h2>
<p>Hoping to unlock the secret of seeing the spiritual world, Clarke witnesses Dr Raymond’s experiment on a young girl’s mind, which leaves her insane. Years later, Clarke realises that similar strange events seem to be happening and a young woman, Helen Vaughan, appears to be at the centre of it. </p>
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<p>Originally published in 1894, Arthur Machen’s novella may be one that you’ve previously read. Nevertheless, its connection with Wales has historically been overlooked, possibly due to the author’s own internal conflict with his Welsh identity. </p>
<p>Edited and re-released in 2018, <a href="https://www.google.co.uk/books/edition/The_Great_God_Pan_and_Other_Horror_Stori/CMBEDwAAQBAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=The+Great+God+Pan+by+Arthur+Machen&printsec=frontcover">The Great God Pan</a> explores themes of the occult, sexuality, insanity and experimentation. It’s an ideal read for people who like traditional 19th-century horror. </p>
<h2>The Library Suicides by Fflur Dafydd (2023)</h2>
<p>Lost and grieving their mother’s death, twins Ana and Nan plan their revenge against the man they believe is responsible: the literary critic Eben. Trapped within the National Library of Wales, Ana and Nan have Eben exactly where they want him, until the plan starts to go awry. </p>
<p>This novel is an English language re-visioning of Fflur Dafydd’s 2009 Welsh language novel, <a href="https://www.ylolfa.com/products/9781847711694/y-llyfrgell">Y Llyfrgell</a>, which was also made into an award-winning <a href="https://ffilmcymruwales.com/our-work/y-llyfrgell-library-suicides">film</a> in 2016. </p>
<p>The Library Suicides is part psychological thriller and dystopian gothic fiction, which deals with themes of literature, complex identities and bereavement. And all this is set against the backdrop of the grand library in Aberystwyth.</p>
<h2>Stranger Within The Gates: A Collection of Short Stories by Bertha Thomas (1912)</h2>
<p>This collection opens with a young Englishwoman arriving in Wales. Soon, she meets her new landlady, Mrs Trinaman, who recalls the extraordinary tale of her former life as the local madwoman, Winifred Owen.</p>
<p><a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books/about/Stranger_Within_the_Gates.html?id=hWgfAQAAIAAJ&redir_esc=y">Stranger Within The Gates</a> was re-published in 2008 as part of a classics series by <a href="https://www.honno.co.uk">Honno Welsh Women’s Press</a> that aims to rediscover lost Welsh women writers. Bertha Thomas’ short stories examine social changes, women’s rights, hybridity and the significance of “the other”. This is a great read for those who love both satire and the gothic. </p>
<p>The collection also includes Thomas’ pro-suffrage article from 1874, Latest Intelligence from the Planet Venus.</p>
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<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Sophie Jessica Davies does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>These five works of Welsh gothic literature will not only help you explore Wales through the macabre but are likely to give you a good scare too.Sophie Jessica Davies, PhD Candidate and Part-time Teacher, Aberystwyth UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2149062023-10-23T14:55:58Z2023-10-23T14:55:58ZA brief history of goth fashion – from all-black to pastels<p>Goth is the subculture that never died – or more precisely, perhaps, remains undead. The persistence of the subculture’s style is due to the remarkable richness of the cultural tradition on which it draws, and its malleability – its striking ability to absorb new influences into a recognisably coherent aesthetic. </p>
<p>Goth’s visual style has left as vivid a legacy as its music, one that continues to inspire designers, creatives and today’s teenagers far beyond its initial invention.</p>
<p>Early goth fashion shared many of the same reference points as punk. Many of its early icons, such as <a href="https://www.vogue.com/article/dave-vanian-the-damned-style-fashion-birthday">The Damned’s singer Dave Vanian</a> and <a href="https://tinyurl.com/36fft7nk">Siouxsie Sioux</a> of Siouxsie and the Banshees, straddled both scenes. </p>
<p>In late 1970s and early 1980s Britain, subcultural style was very much a DIY affair. In the economic recession of the late 1970s, <a href="https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-1-349-19999-0_2">an improvised approach to style</a> became a necessity for many young people. As the economy boomed later in the 1980s, this remained a form of resistance to a mainstream culture that fetishised wealth. In the ongoing spirit of punk, those pursuing “alternative” style would raid jumble sales and charity shops, recycle army surplus, customise high street fashion and make their own clothes and accessories. </p>
<p>This creative approach to style has been the key to the subculture’s longevity. Goth has always been about mixing things up and adapting what you find to fit your own aesthetic.</p>
<p>The goth aesthetic distinguished itself from punk through its preoccupation with imagery of death and decadence. As such, it seemed to articulate the underlying mood of Margaret Thatcher’s Britain – a culture in which pervasive images of wealth and success were underpinned by policies facilitating <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/1987/05/13/world/thatcher-s-goal-a-changed-britain.html">the disintegration of the social fabric</a>. The earliest goth ensembles, like those associated with <a href="https://thequietus.com/articles/09610-the-bat-cave-alien-sex-fiend-goth">London’s Batcave club</a>, were characterised by ripped fishnet stockings, repurposed bondage gear, deathly makeup and improvised chain jewellery. Towering, backcombed, dyed black hairstyles were a crucial element of the look. </p>
<p>As the 1980s wore on, however, goth style diversified, absorbing looks from other subcultures such as metal, rockabilly and even hippy psychedelia in the model of <a href="https://www.britannica.com/biography/Kate-Bush">Kate Bush</a> or <a href="https://www.vogue.com/article/stevie-nicks-birthday-boho-style-fashion-influence">Stevie Nicks</a>.</p>
<h2>Diversification of goth style</h2>
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<span class="caption">A cyber goth.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/fluffy_steve/3633729268">Fluffy_Steve/flickr</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">CC BY</a></span>
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<p>Although the goth music scene began to lose impetus in the early 1990s, versions of goth style began to appear on the catwalks. </p>
<p>This was most prominent in the work of British designer <a href="https://www.vam.ac.uk/articles/alexander-mcqueen-an-introduction">Alexander McQueen</a>. His uncompromising collections experimented with the macabre in ways that thrilled the alternative scene and high fashion insiders alike. </p>
<p>Meanwhile, goth style became more available to mainstream consumers through high street versions of designer trends. In the US, the Hot Topic chain, founded in 1989, sold alternative style to teenagers through regional mall outlets. </p>
<p><a href="https://www.southparkstudios.co.uk/video-clips/sb581o/south-park-burning-down-hot-topic">For some</a>, this commercialisation diluted goth’s countercultural charge. In contrast to the DIY culture of the 1970s and 80s, a desirable Goth look became became increasingly expensive to acquire. </p>
<p>Nevertheless, the subculture proved resilient, expanding to incorporate new influences. By the later 1990s, hybridisation with dance music culture produced <a href="http://subcultureslist.com/cyber-goth/">cybergoth</a>. Ensembles combining colossal platform boots, neon hair extensions and tech accessories like masks and goggles evoked a dystopian, posthuman future.</p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/the-gothic-vision-at-the-heart-of-alexander-mcqueens-savage-beauty-38544">The gothic vision at the heart of Alexander McQueen's savage beauty</a>
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<span class="caption">A woman dressed in the Gothic Lolita style.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Old_school_gothic_lolita_fashion.jpg">Wikicommons</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/">CC BY-SA</a></span>
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<p>The international spread of the subculture generated new styles, too. <a href="https://www.vam.ac.uk/articles/lolita-fashion-japanese-street-style#slideshow=63778258&slide=0">Japanese Gothic Lolita style</a> aimed to refashion its wearer in the image of a Victorian doll.</p>
<p>Exported internationally in the early 2000s via manga and anime, Gothic Lolita became a major influence on western goth style. It indirectly inspired “cute” gothic looks like “<a href="https://aesthetics.fandom.com/wiki/Pastel_Goth">pastel goth</a>” – goth style in the sweet, childish colours the subculture once rejected.</p>
<p>At the same time, many goths cultivated a passion for authentic recreations of historic costume, harking back to period styles inspired by the literary and cinematic tradition of the gothic. At the twice-annual <a href="https://www.whitbygothweekend.co.uk/">Whitby Goth Weekend</a>, founded in 1994, many participants pay tribute to Dracula author Bram Stoker by parading the sea front of the town where the author found his inspiration for the novel in meticulously crafted Victorian ensembles.</p>
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<figcaption><span class="caption">40 years of goth style (in under four minutes).</span></figcaption>
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<p>For members of the subculture, one particular style might define their personal image, or they might choose to wear different looks for different occasions. </p>
<p>The “<a href="https://www.killstar.com/blogs/journal/mastering-a-corporate-goth-style">corp goth</a>” even adapts their look for the corporate environment, wearing office-friendly versions of the style. But crucially, by 2023, there are many ways of being a goth.</p>
<h2>The secrets of goth’s endurance</h2>
<p>Goth style has its controversies. Subcultures are, understandably, <a href="https://theblogginggoth.com/2022/01/15/dark-wash-recycle-gothcore-and-high-fashion/">resistant to the appropriation</a> of their style by outsiders. There is <a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-22026044">endless debate</a> about whether offshoots and associated aesthetics such as emo or <a href="https://research.stmarys.ac.uk/id/eprint/549/">steampunk</a> can be counted as goth or not.</p>
<p>While the finer points of these debates can be difficult to resolve, this very diversity is the key to goth’s longevity. Goth is not one look, one style – it is a rich, complex aesthetic drawing on many influences across literature, art and culture. This makes it remarkably resilient to cultural change, as it is able to shift to meet new demands.</p>
<p><div data-react-class="InstagramEmbed" data-react-props="{"url":"https://www.instagram.com/p/CAgpy5gH4h1","accessToken":"127105130696839|b4b75090c9688d81dfd245afe6052f20"}"></div></p>
<p>Goth is not static, but a living tradition. <a href="https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1468-4446.2011.01364.x">Research shows</a> that many goths remain active in the subculture long past youth. Moreover, new generations of goths continue to seize the subculture and make it their own. </p>
<p>One of the most dynamic developments of recent years is the mobilisation of goths of colour, <a href="https://www.vice.com/en/article/939mb3/theres-nothing-more-goth-than-being-black">sometimes known as Afrogoths</a>, who resist the presumed association between goth and pale skin and draw music and fashion inspiration from black culture.</p>
<p>It is important that we recognise these new ways of being a goth, even if some of them find connection through visual rather than musical culture. In them, lies the subculture’s lively (undead) future.</p>
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<p><em>Looking for something good? Cut through the noise with a carefully curated selection of the latest releases, live events and exhibitions, straight to your inbox every fortnight, on Fridays. <a href="https://theconversation.com/uk/newsletters/something-good-156">Sign up here</a>.</em></p>
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<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Catherine Spooner does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Goth has always been about mixing things up and adapting what you find to fit your own aesthetic.Catherine Spooner, Professor of Literature and Culture, Lancaster UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2132762023-09-18T14:54:12Z2023-09-18T14:54:12ZHow reading ‘dark academia’ novels can help new students feel more at home at university<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/547492/original/file-20230911-15667-vlazi6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=53%2C44%2C5890%2C3912&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://unsplash.com/photos/zeH-ljawHtg">Giammarco Boscaro/Unsplash</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Over the next few weeks, <a href="https://www.hesa.ac.uk/news/19-01-2023/higher-education-student-statistics-uk-202122-released#:%7E:text=The%20data%20shows%20a%20total,first%20year%20of%20their%20course.">over a million</a> new university students will be heading to campus. Many of them may be <a href="https://www.youngminds.org.uk/young-person/coping-with-life/looking-after-yourself-at-uni/#:%7E:text=It%27s%20natural%20to%20feel%20worried,some%20even%20offer%20counselling%20services">nervous</a> about what lies ahead, which is understandable given that most of them will be in a new place, living away from home for the first time, and faced with the prospect of building an entirely new friendship group.</p>
<p>One of their main worries will be about establishing a <a href="https://unibuddy.com/blog/the-science-behind-belonging/">sense of belonging</a>. Anxiety around this is completely normal, but I believe that reading literature from the “dark academia” genre could help put such fears to rest. </p>
<p>Dark academia began as a <a href="https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/iph-2022-2047/html">social media aesthetic</a> around 2015. It romanticises university life through images of leather-bound books with yellowed pages, wet cobblestones, gothic architecture shrouded in mist, and students in leather brogues, vintage sweaters and tweed jackets.</p>
<p>It became popular during <a href="https://ucr.sljol.info/articles/10.4038/ucr.v3i2.74">lockdown</a>, when university students were isolated in dorm rooms and secondary students envisioned freer future lives. Dark academia is heavily inspired by <a href="https://crimereads.com/dark-academia-your-guide-to-the-new-wave-of-post-secret-history-campus-thrillers/">gothic literature</a> and includes <a href="https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/133251/the-secret-history-by-tartt-donna/9780241621905">The Secret History</a> by Donna Tartt (1992), <a href="https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250095299/ifwewerevillains#:%7E:text=If%20We%20Were%20Villains%20was,%2C%20friendship%2C%20and%20truth.%22">If We Were Villains</a> by M.L.Rio (2018), and <a href="https://www.harpercollins.com/products/babel-r-f-kuang">Babel</a> by R.F.Kuang (2022).</p>
<p>It draws upon the <a href="https://www.uwp.co.uk/book/history-of-the-gothic-gothic-literature-1825-1914/">elements</a> that make <a href="https://www.gale.com/ebooks/9781438149738/encyclopedia-of-gothic-literature">gothic literature</a> so popular – mysteries set in beautiful yet often remote and potentially dangerous locations, with <a href="https://kingswordplay.ca/documents/Feminism-Gothic-YWP.pdf">outsider protagonists who question the status quo</a> – and places them on university campuses.</p>
<h2>Relatable themes</h2>
<p>Like many real students, the main character typically feels out of place, awkward and alone. They question whether they belong at their university and if they will ever fit in. </p>
<p>Richard in <a href="https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/133251/the-secret-history-by-tartt-donna/9780241621905">The Secret History</a>, Ann in <a href="https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/452659/the-cloisters-by-hays-katy/9781787636392">The Cloisters</a> by Katy Hays (2023), and Mac in <a href="https://www.hmhco.com/shop/books/Bad-Habits/9780358440871">Bad Habits</a> by Amy Gentry (2019) all come from lower socioeconomic backgrounds. They want to belong in the elite universities they find themselves in, but are unsure of ever fitting in.</p>
<p>In <a href="https://harpercollins.co.uk/products/babel-or-the-necessity-of-violence-an-arcane-history-of-the-oxford-translators-revolution-rf-kuang#:%7E:text=Orphaned%20in%20Canton%20and%20brought,like%20paradise%20to%20Robin%20Swift.&text=But%20can%20a%20student%20stand,and%20the%20sacrifices%20of%20resistance.">Babel</a>, Robin, Ramy and Victoire are all students from minority backgrounds, whose worry about belonging is validated by their experience of prejudice and bias. </p>
<p>Many students – particularly those from non-white, non-traditional backgrounds – face a variety of “<a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/13596748.2021.1909921">hidden curriculums</a>” at university. These are unspoken norms and expectations that are taken for granted as information all students have access to. When a student does not, it makes them feel like they don’t belong – and, in turn, makes them <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/0309877X.2021.1915967?casa_token=oCf1_QLf0P0AAAAA:moY24UtF7BwWBmBV925t5XsPUB2NEU6MzAurIDWG20ZxBb1w2nBX5uVtQm3_A3p1Ie9rV0w_uyFi">less likely to achieve as well</a> as their more informed counterparts.</p>
<p>Other characters (and real-life students too) worry that they are not intelligent enough. In <a href="https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250095299/ifwewerevillains#:%7E:text=If%20We%20Were%20Villains%20was,%2C%20friendship%2C%20and%20truth.%22">If We Were Villains</a>, drama student Joe’s unease revolves around being second best. He describes feeling “doomed to always play supporting roles in someone else’s story”, and benefiting from the “overflow” of his roommate’s “popularity”.</p>
<p>These themes in dark academia books can help to bring to life the <a href="https://crimereads.com/dark-academia-your-guide-to-the-new-wave-of-post-secret-history-campus-thrillers/">various structures</a> and <a href="https://www.ceeol.com/search/article-detail?id=1096977">biases that do harm</a> at universities. </p>
<h2>How reading dark academia can be helpful</h2>
<p>The appeal of dark academia lies – in part – in the vulnerability of its characters. Often, they overcome this vulnerability by becoming part of a <a href="https://www.ceeol.com/search/article-detail?id=1096977">close-knit friendship group</a> of fellow students.</p>
<p>The genre helps students to realise how important relationships are. All of us, at some point in our lives, have felt like we do not belong. For students, the negativity and discomfort of not belonging explored in these novels can act as reassurance – that others feel the same way they do.</p>
<p>The characters move from feelings of insecurity to the joyous intensity of finding friendships that are deep and meaningful. Together, these friendship groups face down whatever dark mystery is at the heart of the plot and emerge battered and bruised, but survivors nonetheless.</p>
<p>While it is highly unlikely that most students will ever face the dark and twisted challenges set out in these novels (which often involve death, if not murder), the university environment is filled with challenges. Dark academia helps to show students how to manage these challenges and – through forming close friendships and support networks – how to come out the other side.</p>
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<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/536131/original/file-20230706-17-460x2d.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/536131/original/file-20230706-17-460x2d.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/536131/original/file-20230706-17-460x2d.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/536131/original/file-20230706-17-460x2d.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/536131/original/file-20230706-17-460x2d.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/536131/original/file-20230706-17-460x2d.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/536131/original/file-20230706-17-460x2d.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Amy Gentry, author of Bad Habits, is my cousin, but this work has developed outside of that relationship.</span></em></p>Dark academia novels romanticise student life, but their stories of friendship are inspiring.Caron Gentry, Professor Vice-Chancellor, Faculty of Arts, Design and Social Sciences, Northumbria University, NewcastleLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2092332023-07-19T00:59:52Z2023-07-19T00:59:52ZArresting, dry and fast-paced: ABC series Bay of Fires brings a new humour to the tradition of Australian Gothic<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/537708/original/file-20230717-226567-g3zaz0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=24%2C8%2C5427%2C3792&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">ABC</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Anika Van Cleef (Marta Dusseldorp) is a high-powered “Toorak Mum”. She is CEO of an investment company she took over from her controlling father and now runs with her new partner, Johann (Nikolai Nikolaeff). </p>
<p>But Anika is betrayed by Johann and becomes the target of an attempted murder. She soon discovers Johann has hired professional thugs to murder her and her children, Otis (Imi Mbedla) and Iris (Ava Caryofyllis). </p>
<p>A mysterious police detective, Airini (Rachel House), appears in a convenience shop. To escape the threat, Anika and her children must make the forced (and reluctant) relocation to a remote Tasmanian town.</p>
<p>They find themselves in Mystery Bay, humorously characterised by a Canberra politician as a place that “nobody’s ever heard of, boasts no features, and no outsider wants to visit”. </p>
<p>Bay of Fires, the new drama from the ABC, is arresting, dry and fast-paced. It brings new insights to national understandings of city-country divides and explores small town isolation as a means of social control. </p>
<p>But perhaps most interestingly is the way it advances the genre of <a href="https://theconversation.com/australian-gothic-from-hanging-rock-to-nick-cave-and-kylie-this-genre-explores-our-dark-side-111742">Australian Gothic</a> in humorous and unexpected ways. </p>
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<h2>An Australian Gothic</h2>
<p>Mystery Bay is a quiet and insular community, nicknamed Misery Bay by the locals.</p>
<p>The locals observe the strangers’ arrival with forensic attention. They are variously suspicious, hostile and strange. As we get to know the townsfolk, they open the door into a Gothic world of mystery and the supernatural. </p>
<p>The rural Tasmanian landscape has a dark power, but the haunting vistas pale in comparison to the layers of criminal activity and depraved lives eking out an existence in entangled community relations. </p>
<p>Australian Gothic began in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, combining elements of traditional <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gothic_fiction">European Gothic literature</a> – characterised by horror, mystery and the supernatural – mixed with the unique Australian landscape, history and cultural identity.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/537709/original/file-20230717-81876-7bkzb7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="Three bikies." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/537709/original/file-20230717-81876-7bkzb7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/537709/original/file-20230717-81876-7bkzb7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=419&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/537709/original/file-20230717-81876-7bkzb7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=419&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/537709/original/file-20230717-81876-7bkzb7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=419&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/537709/original/file-20230717-81876-7bkzb7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=526&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/537709/original/file-20230717-81876-7bkzb7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=526&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/537709/original/file-20230717-81876-7bkzb7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=526&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">The locals are variously suspicious, hostile and strange.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">ABC</span></span>
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<p>The harsh and unforgiving Australian environment provided a fertile ground for the development of a distinctive Gothic tradition. </p>
<p>Vast and desolate landscapes, rugged coastlines and extreme weather conditions replaced European cathedrals and graveyards. Settlers faced isolation, death and the brutal realities of the convict system. They encountered other worlds through Indigenous Australian communities. </p>
<p>These experiences became a central theme in Australian Gothic literature and the sub-genre <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tasmanian_Gothic">Tasmanian Gothic</a>. </p>
<p>There are remarkable resonances between Bay of Fires and early examples of Australian Gothic, such as Marcus Clarke’s novel For the Term of His Natural Life (1874), which portrays the horrors of the penal colony system and the brutal treatment of convicts. </p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/537710/original/file-20230717-226567-jzfxe9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="Marta Dusseldorp as Stella in the woods." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/537710/original/file-20230717-226567-jzfxe9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/537710/original/file-20230717-226567-jzfxe9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=419&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/537710/original/file-20230717-226567-jzfxe9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=419&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/537710/original/file-20230717-226567-jzfxe9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=419&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/537710/original/file-20230717-226567-jzfxe9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=526&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/537710/original/file-20230717-226567-jzfxe9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=526&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/537710/original/file-20230717-226567-jzfxe9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=526&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">The Australian environment provided a fertile ground for a distinctive Gothic tradition.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">ABC</span></span>
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<p>As with Clarke’s novel, Bay of Fires is set against the backdrop of the harsh Tasmanian wilderness. Both explore themes of oppression and isolation. The first moments of Anika and her children’s arrival in Tasmania clearly mark the landscape as dangerous. They hit a large kangaroo on the road to Mystery Bay and their BMW is completely written off. </p>
<p>Machines are no match for the wild animals of Tasmania. </p>
<p>The genre isn’t without levity. Joseph Furphy’s Such Is Life (1903) is a darkly humorous and ironic portrayal of rural life. Mystery Bay continues this in a dry satire of country town life. The shops won’t open for the newcomers. People are highly suspicious of them, and basic life tasks are made almost impossible by the hostile nature of local culture. </p>
<p>The Gothic tradition is extended in Australian literature in the works of contemporary authors such as Peter Carey, Kate Grenville and Tim Winton, and in film (Picnic at Hanging Rock, The Babadook), visual arts (Arthur Boyd, Fred Williams) and music (Nick Cave, The Church).</p>
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<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/australian-gothic-from-hanging-rock-to-nick-cave-and-kylie-this-genre-explores-our-dark-side-111742">Australian Gothic: from Hanging Rock to Nick Cave and Kylie, this genre explores our dark side</a>
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<h2>Twisting the genre</h2>
<p>Bay of Fires is a continuation of this significant Australian genre. </p>
<p>It draws on the conventions of traditional Gothic literature in its reflections of the harsh realities and haunting beauty of the Australian environment and the mysterious – indeed treacherous – characters of the cold townspeople.</p>
<p>However, there is a tongue-in-cheek humour and astute commentary of social class that offers a new dimension to this established settler colonial Australian tradition. Otis (Imi Mbedla) is particularly amusing, offering ongoing critical commentary on race, class and gender.</p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/537711/original/file-20230717-201541-y6n7x5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="A woman and two children walk on a tarmac." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/537711/original/file-20230717-201541-y6n7x5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/537711/original/file-20230717-201541-y6n7x5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=419&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/537711/original/file-20230717-201541-y6n7x5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=419&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/537711/original/file-20230717-201541-y6n7x5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=419&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/537711/original/file-20230717-201541-y6n7x5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=526&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/537711/original/file-20230717-201541-y6n7x5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=526&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/537711/original/file-20230717-201541-y6n7x5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=526&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">The series captures dark and mysterious aspects of the nation’s past and present.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">ABC</span></span>
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<p>This insightful humour is a new angle on Tasmanian Gothic’s combination of horror, mystery and the grotesque. When asked by his sister why all the townsfolk are staring at them, Otis replies: “Because she’s a Toorak wanker and we are private school dickheads”. </p>
<p>This wry commentary breaks up the traditional dark and atmospheric tone of Tasmanian Gothic which, when it employs humour, is usually elements of gallows humour, black comedy or irony. Bay of Fires has a much stronger emphasis on humour and a comedy that is almost slapstick. </p>
<p>The series captures dark and mysterious aspects of the nation’s past and present which shape our national imagination and the Australian Gothic genre, all with a larrikin wit. </p>
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<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/how-deadloch-flips-the-nordic-noir-crime-genre-on-its-arse-and-makes-it-funny-208478">How Deadloch flips the Nordic Noir crime genre on its arse and makes it funny</a>
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<img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/209233/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Anna Hickey-Moody receives funding from The Australian Research Council.</span></em></p>The harsh and unforgiving Australian environment provided a fertile ground for the development of a distinctive Gothic tradition. Bay of Fires explores the genre in humorous and unexpected ways.Anna Hickey-Moody, Professor of Intersectional Humanities, Maynooth, National University of Ireland, RMIT UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2053302023-05-15T11:47:07Z2023-05-15T11:47:07ZSchmigadoon!: darker musical influences make season two a more complex, but satisfying watch<p><em>Warning: the following article contains spoilers for Schmigadoon! series one and two.</em></p>
<p>Apple TV’s musical comedy <a href="https://tv.apple.com/gb/show/schmigadoon/umc.cmc.1tqmf2znhr4oui4vo69ircyui">Schmigadoon!</a> has just aired its second series. It follows couple Josh (Keegan-Michael Key) and Melissa (Cecily Strong) in their adventures in the magical town of Schmigadoon, which they stumble across while backpacking.</p>
<p>The musical town of the show’s first season is an amalgamation of the golden age musicals of the 1940s and 1950s. Think <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V6uD9-aLCps">Oklahoma!</a> (1943), <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jqgTaNqolXo">Carousel</a> (1945) and <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LI_Oe-jtgdI">The Music Man</a> (1957) – simple romantic storylines and a happy cast of characters who frequently burst into song for no reason.</p>
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<figcaption><span class="caption">The trailer for season two of Schmigadoon!</span></figcaption>
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<p>Melissa loves these musicals and can predict the course of events based on their familiar formula. Following the plot of <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qpk9JNUDr9k">Brigadoon</a> (1954), the couple can only leave the town when they find love – that is, when they fix their rocky relationship. Happily, it works: the corny musical tropes become deeply meaningful and a vital therapeutic resource for the couple.</p>
<p>When we meet them at the start of season two, Josh and Melissa are enjoying the doping effects of the musical and its required suspension of disbelief. They marry and decide to start a family. </p>
<p>However, when their fertility journey proves difficult, reality hits hard. Compared with the dopamine-fest of season one, their situation feels bleak.</p>
<p>German playwright and theorist Bertolt Brecht found <a href="https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/cambridge-companion-to-brecht/2D0C869D864DA0636AECA03E3E77414F">“autonomous” dramatic music</a> (music for music’s sake) suspicious. He believed that theatre should be used to challenge audiences and promote social ideas and self-reflection. This is threatened by pleasure-focused operas and musicals.</p>
<p>Brecht believed that dramatic music’s seductive charms could dupe audiences into submission, so the musical comprised a dangerous smokescreen. In Josh and Melissa’s case, the musical has distorted their sense of reality and they are about to enter a world of danger.</p>
<h2>The musical darkens</h2>
<p>As Schmigadoon did a great job of solving their problems last time, the couple decide to return, hoping it will once again work its magic. When they find the town, however, it has transitioned into Schmicago: the dark, sensual era of the 1960s and 1970s musicals such as <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EfL1J4QVhSM">Cabaret</a> (1966), Chicago (1975) and <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=acHBq_oZm-8">Sweeney Todd</a> (1979).</p>
<p>This era is more concerned with terror, excitement, shock and disgust – themes familiar in gothic fiction. These musicals resemble the formulaic gothic dramas of <a href="https://www.psupress.org/books/titles/0-271-01809-7.html">excess, hyperbole and fantasy</a>, which garnered a similar mass appeal from the late 18th century.</p>
<p>This era was also associated with concept musicals, <a href="https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/cambridge-companion-to-the-musical/65AF6EFD39A6DDCFF13AB3CDBD5C749E">which rejected</a> traditional storylines and linear narratives in favour of abstract ideas. </p>
<p>As concept musicals experimented with traditional structural boundaries, lines between reality and fantasy became unstable, providing a maze-like structure for eccentric stories to be told.</p>
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<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/XY2zwk9fepQ?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">Ariana DeBose performs Over and Done in Schmigadoon! season two.</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The characters in Schmicago musicals reflect those in English gothic <a href="https://www.bl.uk/romantics-and-victorians/themes/fin-de-siecle">fin-de-siècle</a> novels. </p>
<p>Oscar Wilde’s Dorian Gray loses his identity in his picture, the identity of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr Jekyll becomes entangled with Mr Hyde and the victims of Bram Stoker’s Dracula lose theirs in vampirism. </p>
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<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/bram-stokers-dracula-bats-garlic-disturbing-sexualities-and-a-declining-empire-186392">Bram Stoker's Dracula: bats, garlic, disturbing sexualities and a declining empire</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p>Meanwhile, Sweeney Todd is overwhelmed with revenge, Cabaret’s Sally Bowles sports an impenetrably vivacious facade and the world of law in Chicago is hopelessly subsumed in the world of show business.</p>
<p>The unconventional forms of these musicals represent their characters’ damaged boundaries: their inability to maintain a clear sense of morality, or to keep their delusions from infecting reality.</p>
<h2>How season two deviates</h2>
<p>Season one followed the structure of a golden age musical. Josh and Melissa inevitably realised their love for each other and escaped. Season two’s outcome, however, is less predictable. The musicals of this era have no clear moral and the couple have no idea what lesson they must learn in order to escape.</p>
<p>What’s more, the Narrator (Titus Burgess) is highly unreliable. While Melissa is an expert in old-timey musicals, she is less familiar with the Schmicago era. Her lack of foresight allows the narrative to take a chaotic shape.</p>
<p>The couple are trapped in a place that is apparently trying to destroy them. As this era is more about survival than happiness, they are forced to confront the fact that – as in many gothic tales – the only solution might be to kill the villain. The moral of the story becomes harder to untangle.</p>
<p>The Narrator is based on the narrator of <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9U2Ji5-MebA">Pippin</a> (1972), the Leading Player who, in the show’s climax, tries to convince Pippin to set himself on fire for the “thrilling finale”. When Josh and Melissa are about to leave Schmicago, the townspeople try to persuade them to stay and avoid the misery of reality. </p>
<p>The Narrator’s plea for them to stay in the world of “magic” echoes the Leading Player’s plea for Pippin to give up his life to perform one glorious feat of spectacle. Like Pippin, however, Josh and Melissa refuse: all they want is something real.</p>
<p>As it turns out, this was the lesson all along. The magic of a musical is only effective when contrasted with reality. Indeed, that is the appeal of a Schmicago musical, which integrates misery with joy to create a stronger emotional impact.</p>
<p>Schmicago teaches that musical logic is not meant to be applied directly to reality, or necessarily untangled, but used in configuration with reality to draw personal conclusions. The musical’s effect becomes enlightening rather than doping, providing catharsis and self-knowledge.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/205330/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Jodie Passey does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Compared to the dopamine-fest of season one, Josh and Melissa’s situation in season two feels bleak.Jodie Passey, PhD Candidate, Lancaster UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1705172021-10-26T12:20:29Z2021-10-26T12:20:29ZFrom Black Death to COVID-19, pandemics have always pushed people to honor death and celebrate life<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/428355/original/file-20211025-15-rtfaio.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=3%2C0%2C2119%2C1517&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Death waits for no man – and pandemics drive the point home.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:The_Triumph_of_Death_by_Pieter_Bruegel_the_Elder.jpg">Pieter Brueghel the Elder: 'The Triumph of Death'</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">CC BY</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>After the last couple of Halloweens <a href="https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2020/10/04/these-37-states-have-cancelled-popular-halloween-events/42702997/">were plagued</a> by doubt and worry thanks to a global <a href="https://theconversation.com/how-do-pandemics-end-history-suggests-diseases-fade-but-are-almost-never-truly-gone-146066">pandemic with no clear end in sight</a>, Halloween 2022 may <a href="https://nrf.com/topics/holiday-and-seasonal-trends/halloween">feel especially exciting</a> for those <a href="https://theconversation.com/simple-safety-tips-for-trick-or-treating-after-fauci-greenlighted-halloween-2021-170088">ready to celebrate it</a>. Thanks to ongoing vigilance and continuing vaccination efforts, many people in the U.S. are now fortunate enough to feel cautiously optimistic after all those awful months that have passed since March 2020.</p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/428359/original/file-20211025-17-quhcvq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="Etching from Jean-Jacques Manget 'Traite de la peste' 1721." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/428359/original/file-20211025-17-quhcvq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/428359/original/file-20211025-17-quhcvq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=924&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/428359/original/file-20211025-17-quhcvq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=924&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/428359/original/file-20211025-17-quhcvq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=924&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/428359/original/file-20211025-17-quhcvq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1161&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/428359/original/file-20211025-17-quhcvq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1161&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/428359/original/file-20211025-17-quhcvq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1161&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Etching of a plague doctor in the era’s personal protective equipment.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/plague-doctor-from-jean-jacques-manget-traite-de-la-peste-news-photo/1035082756?adppopup=true">Photo 12/Universal Images Group via Getty Images</a></span>
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</figure>
<p><a href="https://newark-rutgers.academia.edu/NUKHETVARLIK">I am a historian of pandemics</a>. And yes, Halloween is my favorite holiday because I get to wear my <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plague_doctor_costume#/media/File:Paul_F%C3%BCrst,_Der_Doctor_Schnabel_von_Rom_(Holl%C3%A4nder_version).png">plague doctor costume</a> complete with a <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plague_doctor_costume#/media/File:Beak_doctor_mask.jpg">beaked mask</a>.</p>
<p>But Halloween opens a little window of freedom for all ages. It lets people move beyond their ordinary social roles, identities and appearances. It is spooky and morbid, yet playful. Even though death is symbolically very much present in Halloween, it’s also a time to celebrate life. The holiday draws from mixed emotions that resonate even more than usual during the COVID-19 era. </p>
<p>Looking at the ways survivors of past pandemics tried to celebrate the triumph of life amid widespread death can add context to the present-day experience. Consider the Black Death — <a href="https://www.medievalacademy.org/page/PandemicWebinar">the mother of all pandemics</a>. </p>
<h2>Black Death birthed a new death culture</h2>
<p><a href="https://scholarworks.wmich.edu/medieval_globe/1/">The Black Death</a> was a pandemic of plague, the infectious disease caused by the bacterium <em>Yersinia pestis</em>. Between 1346 and 1353, plague rampaged across Afro-Eurasia and killed an estimated 40% to 60% of the population. The Black Death ended, but plague carried on, making <a href="https://doi.org/10.1017/npt.2020.27">periodic return visits through the centuries</a>.</p>
<p>The catastrophic effects of plague and its relentless recurrences changed life in every possible way.</p>
<p>One aspect was <a href="http://chinhnghia.com/Death%20and%20Dying%20in%20Medieval%20and%20Early%20Modern%20Europe.pdf">attitudes toward death</a>. In Europe, high levels of mortality caused by the Black Death and its recurrent outbreaks made death even more visible and tangible than ever before. The ubiquity of death contributed to the <a href="https://classic.lib.rochester.edu/robbins/death">making of a new death culture</a>, which found an expression in art. For example, images of the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Danse_Macabre#/media/File:Nuremberg_chronicles_-_Dance_of_Death_(CCLXIIIIv).jpg">dance of death or “danse macabre”</a> showed the dead and the living coming together.</p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/428343/original/file-20211025-25-w7yf47.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="skeleton takes the hand of a bishop in an etching" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/428343/original/file-20211025-25-w7yf47.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/428343/original/file-20211025-25-w7yf47.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=692&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/428343/original/file-20211025-25-w7yf47.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=692&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/428343/original/file-20211025-25-w7yf47.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=692&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/428343/original/file-20211025-25-w7yf47.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=870&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/428343/original/file-20211025-25-w7yf47.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=870&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/428343/original/file-20211025-25-w7yf47.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=870&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Everyone from the poor to the powerful will eventually dance with death.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://wellcomecollection.org/works/yq6rwyat">Dance of death: death and the bishop. Etching attributed to J.-A. Chovin, 1720-1776, after the Basel dance of death. Wellcome Collection.</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">CC BY</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Even though skeletons and skulls representing death had appeared in <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2016/04/25/middleeast/turkish-skeleton-says-relax/index.html">ancient</a> and <a href="https://blogs.bl.uk/digitisedmanuscripts/2015/10/things-that-go-bump-in-the-night.html">medieval</a> art, such symbols gained renewed emphasis following the Black Death. These images epitomized the transient and volatile nature of life and the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Danse_Macabre#/media/File:Dance_of_Death_(replica_of_15th_century_fresco;_National_Gallery_of_Slovenia).jpg">imminence of death for all</a> — <a href="https://archive.org/details/clevelandart-1929.161-dance-of-death-the-m">rich</a> and <a href="https://archive.org/details/clevelandart-1929.168-dance-of-death-the-p">poor</a>, <a href="https://archive.org/details/clevelandart-1929.169-dance-of-death-the-c">young</a> and <a href="https://archive.org/details/clevelandart-1929.165-dance-of-death-the-o">old</a>, <a href="https://archive.org/details/clevelandart-1922.251-the-merchant">men</a> and <a href="https://archive.org/details/clevelandart-1929.166-dance-of-death-the-c">women</a>.</p>
<p>Artists’ allegorical references to death stressed the closeness of the hour of death. Skulls and other “<a href="https://www.medievalists.net/2014/10/memento-mori-medieval-images-death/">memento mori</a>” symbols, including coffins and hourglasses, appeared in <a href="https://www.tuttartpitturasculturapoesiamusica.com/2015/08/Jan-van-Scorel.html">Renaissance paintings</a> to remind viewers that because death was imminent, one must prepare for it.</p>
<p>Bruegel the Elder’s famous “<a href="https://www.museodelprado.es/en/the-collection/art-work/the-triumph-of-death/d3d82b0b-9bf2-4082-ab04-66ed53196ccc">Triumph of Death</a>” stressed the unpredictability of death: Armies of skeletons march over people and take their lives, whether ready or not. </p>
<p>Death culture influenced the 19th-century Western European doctors who started writing about historical pandemics. Through this lens, they imagined a specific version of past pandemics — the Black Death, in particular — that one modern historian named “<a href="https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00209432">Gothic epidemiology</a>.”</p>
<h2>Flawed image of Black Death emerged in 1800s</h2>
<p>The German medical historian Justus Hecker, who died in 1850, and his followers <a href="https://archive.org/details/blackdeathinfour00heck">wrote about the Black Death</a> in a dark, gloomy, emotional tone. They emphasized its morbid and bizarre aspects, such as violent <a href="https://doi.org/10.1093/pastj/gtm005">anti-Jewish pogroms</a> and the itinerant <a href="https://scholarworks.wmich.edu/hilltopreview/vol9/iss2/5">Flagellants who whipped themselves</a> in public displays of penance. In their 19th-century writing of the Black Death, it was cast as a singular event of cataclysmic proportions — a foreign, peculiar, almost wondrous entity that did not belong to European history. </p>
<p>As it is remembered today, the dominant symbols of the Black Death – like images of uncanny <a href="https://www.smh.com.au/culture/art-and-design/what-s-behind-the-fascination-with-dancing-skeletons-20211005-p58xa1.html">dancing skeletons</a> and the <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6JSlrEHvv_k">Grim Reaper</a> – are products of that Gothic imagination. Ironically, the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plague_doctor#/media/File:Paul_F%C3%BCrst,_Der_Doctor_Schnabel_von_Rom_(coloured_version).png">iconic plague doctor</a> was not a medieval phenomenon but a <a href="https://www.livescience.com/plague-doctors.html">17th-century introduction</a>. It was only then – 300 years post-Black Death – that doctors treating plague patients started wearing <a href="https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/plague-doctor-costumes">special full-body outfits and a beaked mask</a>, a precursor of modern personal protective equipment. So, sadly, my own plague doctor Halloween costume has nothing to do with the Black Death pandemic itself.</p>
<p>Even the term Black Death is a 19th-century invention; none of the medieval witnesses wrote of a “Black Death” or <a href="https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007%2F978-3-030-72304-0_2">thought of plague as black</a>.</p>
<p>The living legacy of this Gothic epidemiology still defines scholarly and popular understanding of plague and may creep into today’s Halloween costumes and decorations.</p>
<h2>Triumph of death or celebration of life?</h2>
<p>Pandemics never mean death and suffering for all. There is strong evidence that Black Death survivors experienced <a href="https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0096513">better living standards</a> and <a href="https://www.medievalists.net/2020/07/black-death-improved-medieval-peasants/">increased prosperity</a>. Even during subsequent outbreaks, differences in class, location and gender informed people’s experiences. The urban poor died in greater numbers, for example, as the well-off fled to their countryside residences. Giovanni Boccaccio’s famous “<a href="https://www.brown.edu/Departments/Italian_Studies/dweb/texts/">Decameron</a>,” written in the immediate aftermath of the Black Death, tells the story of 10 young people who <a href="https://theconversation.com/how-the-rich-reacted-to-the-bubonic-plague-has-eerie-similarities-to-todays-pandemic-135925">took refuge in the countryside</a>, passing their days telling each other entertaining stories as a way to forget the horrors of plague and imminent death.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/428361/original/file-20211025-19-kzbx01.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="nobility lounge in the countryside and listen to a storyteller" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/428361/original/file-20211025-19-kzbx01.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/428361/original/file-20211025-19-kzbx01.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=398&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/428361/original/file-20211025-19-kzbx01.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=398&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/428361/original/file-20211025-19-kzbx01.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=398&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/428361/original/file-20211025-19-kzbx01.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=500&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/428361/original/file-20211025-19-kzbx01.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=500&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/428361/original/file-20211025-19-kzbx01.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=500&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The characters of ‘The Decameron’ retreated and distracted themselves from death.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/the-decameron-private-collection-news-photo/903373326">Heritage Images/Hulton Fine Art Collection via Getty Images</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>A later example is Ogier Ghiselin de Busbecq, a Habsburg ambassador to the Ottoman Empire who took refuge in the Princes’ Islands off the coast of Istanbul during a plague outbreak in 1561. <a href="https://lsupress.org/books/detail/the-turkish-letters-of-ogier-ghiselin-de-busbecq/">His memoir</a> describes how he spent his days fishing and enjoying other pleasant pastimes, even while the daily death toll in the city surpassed 1,000 for months. </p>
<p>Countless narratives testify that recurrent outbreaks of plague inspired people to find new ways to embrace life and death. For some, this meant turning toward religion: <a href="https://web.stanford.edu/class/history13/Readings/MichaelDol.htm">prayer, fasting and processions</a>. For others, it meant excessive <a href="https://theconversation.com/how-the-bubonic-plague-changed-drinking-habits-160840">drinking</a>, <a href="https://theconversation.com/quarantine-rule-breakers-in-17th-century-italy-partied-all-night-and-some-clergy-condemned-the-feasting-146473">partying</a> and <a href="https://notchesblog.com/2020/03/12/behaviour-which-merits-a-horrible-and-wretched-death-sex-sin-and-the-black-death-in-medieval-england/">illicit</a> <a href="https://inews.co.uk/opinion/sex-in-the-time-of-the-black-death-they-rushed-headlong-into-lust-419327">sex</a>. For still others, <a href="https://historycollection.com/the-remarkable-story-of-eyam-the-village-that-stopped-the-plague-of-1666/">self-isolation</a> and <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2020/03/12/during-pandemic-isaac-newton-had-work-home-too-he-used-time-wisely/">finding comfort in one’s own company</a> did the trick. </p>
<p>No one yet knows <a href="https://www.inverse.com/culture/national-covid-19-memorial-day-may-28">how the COVID-19 pandemic</a> <a href="https://theconversation.com/will-there-be-a-monument-to-the-covid-19-pandemic-146827">will be remembered</a>. But for the moment, Halloween is the perfect occasion to play with the pandemic lesson to simultaneously celebrate life and contemplate death. </p>
<p>As you dress up in spooky costumes or decorate your home with plastic skeletons to celebrate this late capitalist holiday – yes, Halloween is now a thriving <a href="https://www.statista.com/statistics/275726/annual-halloween-expenditure-in-the-united-states/">US$10 billion industry annually</a> – you may find comfort thinking about how the way you feel about life and death <a href="https://theconversation.com/how-the-dead-danced-with-the-living-in-medieval-society-85881">connects you to those who survived past pandemics</a>.</p>
<p>[<em>The Conversation’s science, health and technology editors pick their favorite stories.</em> <a href="https://theconversation.com/us/newsletters/science-editors-picks-71/?utm_source=TCUS&utm_medium=inline-link&utm_campaign=newsletter-text&utm_content=science-favorite">Weekly on Wednesdays</a>.]</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/170517/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Nükhet Varlik does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Halloween, with its mix of the macabre and the playful, provides a moment to reflect on how closely life and death are interwoven – especially in the COVID era.Nükhet Varlik, Associate Professor of History, Rutgers University - NewarkLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1645242021-07-21T14:53:50Z2021-07-21T14:53:50ZAfter findings at Indian Residential Schools, settler Canadians shouldn’t hide behind the ‘gothic narrative’<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/411305/original/file-20210714-13-1rw6iqp.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=7%2C0%2C4726%2C3101&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Firefighters walk past the remains of a Catholic church that was on fire, in Morinville, Alta. in June 2021.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">THE CANADIAN PRESS/Jason Franson</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>The idea of <a href="https://ehprnh2mwo3.exactdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/AAAA-Hamilton-Report-Illustrations-final.pdf">Canada as an expansive crime scene</a> is <a href="https://www.cbc.ca/arts/the-rise-of-indigenous-horror-how-a-fiction-genre-is-confronting-a-monstrous-reality-1.5323428">neither unfamiliar nor disorienting to Indigenous people</a>.</p>
<p>The use of <a href="https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/ground-radar-technology-residential-school-remains-1.6049776">ground-penetrating radar to reveal unmarked graves</a> at or near the sites of former residential schools does what personal narratives of physical, emotional and sexual abuse at residential schools and <a href="http://trc.ca/assets/pdf/Calls_to_Action_English2.pdf">94 Calls to Action</a> were <a href="https://yellowheadinstitute.org/trc/">seemingly not enough to do</a>. They confront the mainstream discourse of reconciliation with some tougher questions about criminal accountability, <a href="https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/saskatoon/critics-blast-catholic-church-1.6086030">unpaid debts</a>, <a href="https://directory.libsyn.com/episode/index/id/17858045/tdest_id/1618577">settler-state legitimacy</a> and the nature of the ground we stand on.</p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/amid-more-shocking-residential-schools-discoveries-non-indigenous-people-must-take-action-161965">Amid more shocking residential schools discoveries, non-Indigenous people must take action</a>
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<p>If the <a href="https://www.theglobeandmail.com/politics/article-ndp-mps-call-for-investigation-into-crimes-against-indigenous-children/">possibility of prosecution</a> on the horizon is something that, up to this point, Canada has managed to render unthinkable, or at most <a href="https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/ottawa/father-johannes-rivoire-charges-stayed-1.5021869">not in the public interest</a>, then what does it mean for <a href="https://lfpress.com/news/local-news/thames-valley-board-lowers-all-flags-to-mourn-residential-school-genocide">flags to be lowered as a demonstration of shared grief</a>? Or for ministers to promise support for “<a href="https://www.theglobeandmail.com/politics/article-ndp-mps-call-for-investigation-into-crimes-against-indigenous-children/">affected communities</a>” to “<a href="https://www.cbc.ca/listen/live-radio/1-63-the-current/clip/15846451-survivor-recalls-kamloops-b.c.-residential-school-remains-children">get on with the healing</a>?”</p>
<p>The Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s (TRC) final report, released six years ago, <a href="https://ehprnh2mwo3.exactdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Volume_1_History_Part_1_English_Web.pdf">established that Canada’s federal government designed and orchestrated the institutionalized genocidal violence of the Indian Residential School (IRS) system</a>.</p>
<p>The location of unmarked graves today highlights some of the limitations of a TRC that did not have the power to subpoena witnesses or documents.</p>
<p>While a TRC working group called the <a href="http://www.trc.ca/assets/pdf/Volume_4_Missing_Children_English_Web.pdf">Missing Children and Unmarked Burials Project</a> was formed to research death, disease and disappearances and to collaborate with communities in the identification and commemoration of gravesites, in <a href="https://globalnews.ca/news/7907424/trc-mass-graves-residential-school-federal-funding/">2009 they asked the federal government for additional funds to carry out this work</a>, but the request was denied.</p>
<h2>The figure of a perpetrator</h2>
<p>As this country processes the <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/jul/08/canada-indigenous-children-deaths-residential-schools">findings of unmarked graves</a>, public discussion has sketched the figure of a perpetrator around the Catholic Church. It is not hard to see why this figure is taking shape.</p>
<p>It was a specific Catholic order, the Missionary Oblates of Mary Immaculate, <a href="https://www.aptnnews.ca/national-news/discovery-of-kamloops-residential-school-gravesite-like-getting-stabbed-in-the-heart/">that ran the Kamloops</a>, <a href="https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/saskatchewan/cowessess-graves-unmarked-residential-school-marieval-1.6077797">Marieval</a> and <a href="https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/penelakut-kuper-residential-school-1.6100201">Kuper Island</a> residential schools, several associated with recently located unmarked graves. </p>
<p>The Catholic Church ran more schools than any other single church denomination.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="A statue of the late Pope John Paul II, standing at the Holy Rosary Catholic Church, has been vandalized with red paint splatter and handprints" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/411304/original/file-20210714-13-1xnmnlp.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/411304/original/file-20210714-13-1xnmnlp.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=418&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/411304/original/file-20210714-13-1xnmnlp.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=418&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/411304/original/file-20210714-13-1xnmnlp.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=418&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/411304/original/file-20210714-13-1xnmnlp.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=525&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/411304/original/file-20210714-13-1xnmnlp.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=525&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/411304/original/file-20210714-13-1xnmnlp.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=525&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<span class="caption">The defacing of a statue of Pope John Paul follows several other actions taken against Catholic churches in the wake of thousands of unmarked graves of Indigenous children, which were found on the grounds of various residential schools run by the church.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">THE CANADIAN PRESS/Rob Drinkwater</span></span>
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<p>There is the unfulfilled <a href="https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/national-indigenous-leaders-papal-visit-1.6084245">call for a papal apology</a>, and the failure of Canadian Catholics to raise more than a fifth of the $25 million that was the <a href="https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/saskatoon/critics-blast-catholic-church-1.6086030">Catholic Church’s share of the compensation</a> to be paid to IRS survivors. This commitment seems to have been abandoned on the basis of <a href="https://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/article-archbishop-wont-commit-to-asking-pope-for-residential-school-apology/">decentralized church structure and poverty</a>, even though Canadian Catholics have been <a href="https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/saskatoon/catholic-buildings-fundraising-residential-school-survivors-1.6090650">raising millions for new buildings</a>.</p>
<p>The loophole of “best efforts” was written into the language of the <a href="https://www.rcaanc-cirnac.gc.ca/eng/1100100015576/1571581687074">Indian Residential School Settlement Agreement</a> (IRSSA). A <a href="https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/saskatoon/church-residential-school-compensation-1.6082935">supplementary part of the IRSSA</a> allowed the Catholic Church to pay some of its compensation to survivors in the form of “in-kind services,” such as counselling.</p>
<p>So, it’s not surprising that <a href="https://www.winnipegfreepress.com/arts-and-life/life/faith/fire-destroys-catholic-church-north-of-edmonton-rcmp-say-blaze-suspicious-574740042.html">burning Catholic churches</a> dot the landscape of Canada, as if we’ve reached the conclusion of <a href="https://www.nypl.org/blog/2018/10/18/brief-history-gothic-horror">some classic gothic novel</a> in which the villain is swept away in a fury of wind and fire.</p>
<p>The inferno seems a <a href="https://www.bl.uk/collection-items/the-monk-by-matthew-lewis">fitting end</a> for the criminally hypocritical.</p>
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<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/honour-those-found-at-residential-schools-by-respecting-the-human-rights-of-first-nations-children-today-163643">Honour those found at residential schools by respecting the human rights of First Nations children today</a>
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<p>In Ottawa (unceded Algonquin territory), an imposing monastery constructed by the Oblates of Mary Immaculate in 1885 is the centrepiece of a 26-acre <a href="https://greystonevillage.ca/community/">redevelopment project called Greystone Village</a>.</p>
<p>The “Oblates Land” was sold to a developer <a href="https://nunatsiaq.com/stories/article/65674fugitive_oblate_priest_joannis_rivoire_must_be_extradited_activists_sa/">in 2014 for $32 million</a>. In 2000, <a href="https://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/priests-ask-taxpayers-to-cover-cost-of-abuses/article4165651/">the order proposed</a> to transfer assets to the federal government in exchange for the government’s assumption of its liability in lawsuits by residential school survivors. That proposal was later replaced by the IRSSA, the terms of which the Catholic Church has failed to fulfil. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="Construction on the former 'Oblates Land'" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/411539/original/file-20210715-25-h9k97j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/411539/original/file-20210715-25-h9k97j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/411539/original/file-20210715-25-h9k97j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/411539/original/file-20210715-25-h9k97j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/411539/original/file-20210715-25-h9k97j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/411539/original/file-20210715-25-h9k97j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/411539/original/file-20210715-25-h9k97j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<span class="caption">Construction is underway on former ‘Oblates Land,’ which was purchased for $32 million instead of being handed over to the federal government.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">(Jennifer Henderson)</span>, <span class="license">Author provided</span></span>
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<h2>Elements of gothic fiction</h2>
<p>But the current focus in <a href="https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/pope-no-apology-residential-school-1.4596439">public culture on the Catholic Church</a> is conveniently narrow and <a href="https://meridian.allenpress.com/aicrj/article-abstract/42/4/43/212111/Residential-School-Gothic-and-Red-Power-Genre">almost intuitively familiar</a> in its reference to <a href="https://www.bl.uk/romantics-and-victorians/articles/gothic-motifs">gothic narrative conventions</a> — perverse actors, imprisoning structures, a distant time, a culturally distant and <a href="https://doi.org/10.7202/011133ar">religious otherness</a>.</p>
<p><a href="https://www.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.7228/manchester/9781784992699.001.0001/upso-9781784992699-chapter-002">Secret burials are the stuff of gothic fiction</a>, but these gothic events actually happened, and in great numbers. Indigenous children were moved to sites of abuse, sadistic discipline and neglect. When the conventions of the gothic genre are deployed to tell the story of residential schools, they produce an inappropriate sense of events being both distant and past. Images of robed priests and church ruins are just too comfortable for many settler Canadians.</p>
<p>For those of us (settlers) implicated in Indigenous displacement and containment through our privileges, the gothic is also a reassuring projection. It wasn’t us; it was the Catholic other.</p>
<p>The gothic narrative about <a href="https://www.bl.uk/collection-items/the-monk-by-matthew-lewis">the moral corruption of the Catholic other</a> has a deep-seated familiarity for much of settler Canada. It is generically familiar and intuitively just-seeming — especially for white, Protestant or secular Canadians, like myself — in its channelling toward the Catholic Church of the complex sensations of horror, disgust, shame and anxiety provoked by the unmarked graves of children. </p>
<p>Taking shelter in this narrative does not have to be deliberate; the genre is a habit of mind — and a self-serving one.</p>
<h2>White capital and its expansion</h2>
<p>The IRS system was made real through a <a href="http://rschools.nan.on.ca/article/the-davin-report-1879-1120.asp">contracting-out arrangement</a>. The churches provided efficiencies: cheap labour and what the <a href="https://dev.nctr.ca/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Davin-Report.pdf">Davin Report</a> called the necessary moral and <a href="http://rschools.nan.on.ca/article/the-notion-of-removal-1131.asp">ideological <em>zeal</em></a>.</p>
<p>These capacities were resourced, deliberately, by a settler-state in the service of white capital and its expansion. <a href="https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/locke-political/#Tole">The Enlightenment principle </a> of the separation of church and state is a flexible thing, especially in the federal government’s delegation of the day-to-day running of IRS’s to those with <em>zeal</em> for the work.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="A woman sits with her legs crossed surrounded by hundreds of children's shoes" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/411307/original/file-20210714-13-1xbipe0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/411307/original/file-20210714-13-1xbipe0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=396&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/411307/original/file-20210714-13-1xbipe0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=396&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/411307/original/file-20210714-13-1xbipe0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=396&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/411307/original/file-20210714-13-1xbipe0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=498&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/411307/original/file-20210714-13-1xbipe0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=498&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/411307/original/file-20210714-13-1xbipe0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=498&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Jane Kigutaq, a kindergarten teacher from Arctic Bay now living in Ottawa, protests on Parliament Hill at a ‘Cancel Canada Day’ in response to the discovery of unmarked Indigenous graves at residential schools.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">THE CANADIAN PRESS/ Patrick Doyle</span></span>
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<p>For many settlers, the feelings of outrage at the vile crimes of villains — <a href="https://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/article-most-canadians-say-church-to-blame-for-residential-school-tragedies/">ready-made by a familiar narrative genre</a> — may shield more complex emotional knots and investments. Investments both emotional and material, in the land and resources of what we now call Canada. </p>
<p>The argument I am making here is about non-Indigenous reckoning with the mundane and normalized, as well as the truly gothic violence of settler-state institutions and <a href="https://thenarwhal.ca/to-understand-b-c-s-push-for-the-coastal-gaslink-pipeline-think-fracking-lng-canada-and-the-site-c-dam/">ongoing public-private collaborations</a> in Indigenous displacement.</p>
<p>This is not a defence of the Catholic Church in Canada. The <a href="https://nctr.ca/joint-statement-nctr-to-work-with-the-oblates-to-access-residential-school-records/">shielding of individuals, records</a> and funds must stop. But it is incumbent upon settlers not to take cover under the genre of the gothic, which the current focus on the Catholic Church offers. Some of those still-to-be found residential school records are about contracting-out arrangements; they have the hands of the representative institutions of settler Canadians all over them.</p>
<p>As residential schools were just one tool for clearing the land and <a href="https://theconversation.com/indigenous-land-defenders-dont-call-me-resilient-ep-6-transcript-156633">building wealth from its commodification</a>, this isn’t just about the historical wrongs of the Catholic Church or Indigenous Affairs or the state; it’s about the foundations of Canadian capital.</p>
<p><em>If you are an Indian Residential School survivor, or have been affected by the residential school system and need help, you can contact the 24-hour Indian Residential Schools Crisis Line: 1-866-925-4419</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/164524/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Jennifer Henderson does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Secret burials are the stuff of gothic fiction, but these gothic events actually happened to Indigenous children.Jennifer Henderson, Professor of Canadian Studies, Carleton UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1465732020-10-20T19:00:59Z2020-10-20T19:00:59ZGuide to the classics: Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier — gender, gothic haunting and gaslighting<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/364188/original/file-20201019-17-7q2d2g.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=11%2C5%2C3964%2C2652&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://media.netflix.com/en/only-on-netflix/81002196/assets/eyJpZCI6InBreDJodzJseXUiLCJuYW1lIjoiUmViZWNjYS0wNTIwNl9SLmpwZyJ9">KERRY BROWN/NETFLIX</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>A small group of novels are famous for their first lines: Jane Austen’s <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1885.Pride_and_Prejudice?from_search=true&from_srp=true&qid=gfHh7geqrm&rank=1">Pride and Prejudice</a> (1813), Herman Melville’s <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/153747.Moby_Dick_or_the_Whale?from_search=true&from_srp=true&qid=qCSb6QVie9&rank=1">Moby Dick</a> (1851) and Leo Tolstoy’s <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/15823480-anna-karenina?from_search=true&from_srp=true&qid=ifDzIA65zG&rank=1">Anna Karenina</a> (1877). <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17899948-rebecca?ac=1&from_search=true&qid=2SJo7Fr5US&rank=1">Rebecca</a> by Daphne Du Maurier (1938), belongs to this elite collection. Its opening line perfectly encapsulates the narrative’s core theme. </p>
<p>“Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again,” the book begins — though it is not Rebecca who speaks. </p>
<p>This is the strange paradox of Du Maurier’s novel: its characters are doomed to refer (and defer) endlessly to Rebecca, who “always” did things, perfectly and elegantly, a certain way, while Rebecca herself never appears.</p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/newly-discovered-du-maurier-poems-shed-light-on-a-talented-writer-honing-her-craft-115659">Newly discovered Du Maurier poems shed light on a talented writer honing her craft</a>
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<h2>Two ghosts</h2>
<p>It is the novel’s unnamed narrator who speaks that first line — the second Mrs de Winter, a woman perpetually in her predecessor’s shadow. She is quite simply, not Rebecca — her husband’s late first wife. </p>
<p>She is exceedingly young — shy, inexperienced, and under the thumb of a wealthy lady who has employed her as a travel companion. </p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/364192/original/file-20201019-19-15ey6l2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="Book cover: blue and white lettering reads Daphne du Maurier, Rebecca" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/364192/original/file-20201019-19-15ey6l2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/364192/original/file-20201019-19-15ey6l2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=941&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/364192/original/file-20201019-19-15ey6l2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=941&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/364192/original/file-20201019-19-15ey6l2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=941&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/364192/original/file-20201019-19-15ey6l2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1183&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/364192/original/file-20201019-19-15ey6l2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1183&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/364192/original/file-20201019-19-15ey6l2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1183&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption"></span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://d1w7fb2mkkr3kw.cloudfront.net/assets/images/book/lrg/9780/3490/9780349006574.jpg">Virago</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>In Monte Carlo, our narrator meets Maxim de Winter, a tall, dark and handsome aristocrat, recently widowed. He swiftly rescues her from drudgery, proposes marriage, and takes her back to England to live in his beautiful and ancient estate, Manderley. </p>
<p>The dual spectres of Rebecca and Manderley haunt de Winter and his bride but the circularity of the narrative makes escape impossible. </p>
<p>The novel begins at the narrative’s end, retelling the events leading to the couple’s nomadic life. Retrospection taints the novel with a pervasive sense of inevitable doom and a desperate sympathy for the naïve young narrator. Now, night after night, she must dream of Manderley again — of its beauty, to be sure, but also, too, of its oppressiveness. </p>
<p>The name “<a href="https://www.behindthename.com/name/rebecca">Rebecca</a>” means to tie or to bind, a further allusion to the first Mrs de Winter’s stranglehold on her home and its inhabitants even after her death. She is imprinted on the house and on its housekeeper, the silent and sinister Mrs Danvers, whose passionate obsession with her former employer <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/1395950?seq=1">is echoed</a> in Carol Ann Duffy’s poem, Warming Her Pearls (1987). </p>
<p>Mrs Danvers’ snide comments constitute Rebecca’s continuing manipulations, even beyond the grave. </p>
<p>When Manderley hosts an annual costume ball, for instance, the second Mrs de Winter is anxious to impress her new husband and his guests. Mrs Danvers encourages her to dress as Caroline de Winter, one of her husband’s ancestors, whose imposing portrait graces the mansion’s hall.</p>
<p>But when she makes her grand entrance, her husband angrily orders her to change. Rebecca had worn an identical costume the year before. Mrs Danvers’ goal of humiliation is achieved.</p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/LFVhB54UqvQ?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">‘I’m asking you to marry me, you little fool.’ A new Netflix adaptation maintains the off-kilter power dynamic of the source text.</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>A limited perspective</h2>
<p>The novel’s use of first-person narration in some ways limits us to the inexperienced worldview of the young narrator. </p>
<p>She stands in for the hordes of <a href="https://digscholarship.unco.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1023&context=honors">young women of the interwar period</a>, their families lost to the war while these young women were left to navigate the world unchaperoned and alone, without interested parties available to approve or consider their choice of husband. </p>
<p>But the reader does come to understand the narrator’s naivety, and to see what she does not see, with increasing anxiety for her safety.</p>
<p>While she cannot see beyond Maxim’s charm, or conceptualise Mrs Danvers’ obsession with Rebecca, the reader looks on helplessly as she experiences what we now recognise as “<a href="https://theconversation.com/explainer-what-does-gaslighting-mean-107888">gaslighting</a>”. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/364190/original/file-20201019-19-19id26b.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="Older woman and younger woman look in mirror, scene for black and white film." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/364190/original/file-20201019-19-19id26b.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/364190/original/file-20201019-19-19id26b.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=403&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/364190/original/file-20201019-19-19id26b.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=403&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/364190/original/file-20201019-19-19id26b.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=403&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/364190/original/file-20201019-19-19id26b.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=507&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/364190/original/file-20201019-19-19id26b.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=507&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/364190/original/file-20201019-19-19id26b.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=507&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Joan Fontaine and Judith Anderson in Hitchcock’s 1940 adaptation.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0032976/mediaviewer/rm3329662465?context=default">IMDB</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/explainer-what-does-gaslighting-mean-107888">Explainer: what does 'gaslighting' mean?</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p>Rebecca can be recognised as part of the genre of the “<a href="https://blogs.kent.ac.uk/melodramaresearchgroup/tag/female-gothic/">female gothic</a>”, critic Ellen Moers’ term for works that derive their terror from women’s domestic entrapment and manipulation, as in the <a href="https://interestingliterature.com/2018/05/a-summary-and-analysis-of-the-bluebeard-fairy-tale/">Bluebeard folktale</a>. </p>
<p>Female gothic narratives seek to expose the psychological manipulations and abuse of power disguised as romance. This alone explains the narrator’s continued sympathy for her “wronged” husband, even at the novel’s end. </p>
<p>This use of the female gothic also constitutes a critique of the novel’s source text: Du Maurier’s Rebecca is <a href="https://journals.openedition.org/lisa/1774?lang=en">a reimagining</a> of Charlotte Bronte’s <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/10210.Jane_Eyre?from_search=true&from_srp=true&qid=sMIZYEaZnM&rank=1">Jane Eyre</a> (1847), in which Jane is disturbed by the looming presence of Mr Rochester’s first wife, the infamous “madwoman in the attic”. </p>
<p>Whereas Jane’s ultimate devotion to her husband is celebrated in that novel, Du Maurier encourages her reader to recognise her narrator’s powerlessness.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/emily-brontes-fierce-flawed-women-not-your-usual-gothic-female-characters-100744">Emily Brontë's fierce, flawed women: not your usual Gothic female characters</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>Birds, horror and adaptation</h2>
<p>Du Maurier’s writing has always lent itself to cinematic adaptation, particularly as horror. Perhaps most famously, Alfred Hitchcock adapted her short story to make <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18869985-the-birds-and-other-stories?from_search=true&from_srp=true&qid=r1xkoBtvGP&rank=20">The Birds</a>, <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0056869/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1">his 1963 film</a>, while <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctv13841pn">Nicholas Roeg’s adaptation of her story</a> <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2871390-don-t-look-now">Don’t Look Now</a> (1971) was <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0069995/?ref_=nv_sr_srsg_0">screened in 1973</a>. </p>
<p>Rebecca’s psychological suspense drew Hitchcock’s attention, and he swiftly adapted it as a film, <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0032976/?ref_=fn_al_tt_2">released in 1940</a> starring Laurence Olivier and Joan Fontaine.</p>
<p>Hitchcock’s Rebecca won the Academy Award for Best Picture that same year. It also spawned a <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/3877748">range of commercial products such as the “Rebecca Luxury Wardrobe” and the “Rebecca Makeup Kit”</a>, one of the first films to do so. </p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/V6mt0ChEPLY?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">‘Everything is kept just as Mrs de Winter liked it. Nothing has been altered since that night.’</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/psycho-turns-60-hitchcocks-famous-fright-film-broke-all-the-rules-140175">Psycho turns 60 – Hitchcock's famous fright film broke all the rules</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p>Strangely, however, these beauty and fashion products were all associated with Rebecca, a woman who never appears on screen.</p>
<p>Hitchcock’s adaptation diverges from Du Maurier’s novel at its conclusion and in the way in which each narrative explains Rebecca’s death. Whereas Du Maurier lays a foundation for Maxim’s capacity for violence, Hitchcock positions him, like the narrator, as a victim of Rebecca’s cruel manipulations. </p>
<p>A new <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2235695/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1">Netflix adaptation</a> of Rebecca stars Lily James, Armie Hammer and Kristen Scott Thomas. This follows recent adaptations of <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/89717.The_Haunting_of_Hill_House">Shirley Jackson’s 1959 novel</a> <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt6763664/">The Haunting of Hill House (2018)</a> and its second season, <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt10970552/">The Haunting of Bly Manor (2020)</a>, a reworking of <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/12948.The_Turn_of_the_Screw">Henry James’ The Turn of The Screw (1898)</a>. </p>
<p>Together, these constitute a series of gothic hauntings that draw attention not only to the psychological trauma inherent in those earlier works, but the way in which that trauma and its terrors are profoundly gendered.</p>
<p>Rebecca’s capacity to haunt the second Mrs de Winter, Mrs Danvers’ maintenance of her place in Manderley, Maxim’s power over his new bride, and the narrator’s cowing acceptance of all of this, point to the gendered power structures of both the gothic and the marriage plot. </p>
<p><em>Rebecca screens on Netflix from October 21.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/146573/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Jessica Gildersleeve does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>A new Netflix adaptation of Rebecca stars Lily James and Armie Hammer. The novel on which it is based, first published in 1938, explores domestic entrapment.Jessica Gildersleeve, Associate Professor of English Literature, University of Southern QueenslandLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1316762020-02-18T02:27:51Z2020-02-18T02:27:51ZPodcast series Oz Gothic breathes new life into Australian gothic storytelling<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/315403/original/file-20200214-11044-wnvk52.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C0%2C1280%2C720&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">South Australian Film Corporation</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>The gothic developed as a European <a href="https://www.shorthistory.org/middle-ages/church-in-the-middle-ages/gothic-cathedrals/">architectural phenomenon</a> in 12th-century France, where awe-inspiring cathedrals reflected a world drenched in religious piety and superstition. </p>
<p>Its veneration was revisited in 18th-century English literature, when writers sought to inspire a <a href="https://www.bl.uk/romantics-and-victorians/articles/the-origins-of-the-gothic">comparable sense</a> of wonder by setting scenes in ruined abbeys, haunted castles and spectacular natural landscapes. </p>
<p>Books like Horace Walpole’s <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/12923.The_Castle_of_Otranto?from_search=true&qid=pjsa3YQ4lt&rank=1">Castle of Otranto</a> (1764), Ann Radcliffe’s <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/93134.The_Mysteries_of_Udolpho?from_search=true&qid=1GngRdZ3F9&rank=1">Mysteries of Udolpho</a> (1794) and Mary Shelley’s <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/35031085-frankenstein?from_search=true&qid=NtVI7KhmSJ&rank=1">Frankenstein</a> (1818) appealed to a wide readership, but were <a href="https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1087&context=englishdiss">dismissed</a> as superficial sensationalism by the literary establishment. </p>
<p>The Australian gothic is unique from its northern counterparts. Instead of grand churches and castles, Australian writers dramatised remote towns, evoking a deep sense of malevolence operating beneath the veneer of ordinary life.</p>
<h2>An Australian literary tradition</h2>
<figure class="align-right ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/315395/original/file-20200213-10980-ycb146.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/315395/original/file-20200213-10980-ycb146.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=915&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/315395/original/file-20200213-10980-ycb146.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=915&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/315395/original/file-20200213-10980-ycb146.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=915&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/315395/original/file-20200213-10980-ycb146.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1150&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/315395/original/file-20200213-10980-ycb146.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1150&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/315395/original/file-20200213-10980-ycb146.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1150&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Marcus Clarke, author of For the Term of His Natural Life.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">State Library Victoria</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>One of the first writers to embrace the gothic sensibility down under was Marcus Clarke. His extraordinary <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/397046.For_the_Term_of_His_Natural_Life?from_search=true&qid=vmHCdE45wW&rank=1">For the Term of His Natural Life</a> (1872) chronicled the terrible physical and psychological torment of protagonist Rufus Dawes, convicted of a crime he did not commit and exiled to Australia’s penal colonies. </p>
<p>Rufus’s aristocratic identity is concealed as a testament to his fortitude and heroism. The plot’s many twists and turns centre on his efforts to escape from penitentiaries. </p>
<p>He is propelled by an abiding love for a young damsel whom he tries unsuccessfully to protect from ruthless villain Maurice Frere — his jailer and his cousin. </p>
<p>The Australian landscape features prominently. The harsh penal colonies of Macquarie Harbour and Port Arthur test the boundaries of human valour, Clarke critiquing a brutal convict system that demoralised and dehumanised. </p>
<p>Tasmanian readers <a href="https://search.informit.com.au/documentSummary;dn=200605082;res=IELAPA;type=pdf">rejected</a> Clarke’s bleak vision of their isle, but For the Term of His Natural Life paved the way for other writers to explore the dark shadows amid the bright Australian light. </p>
<figure class="align-left ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/315398/original/file-20200214-11040-1u351pn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/315398/original/file-20200214-11040-1u351pn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=862&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/315398/original/file-20200214-11040-1u351pn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=862&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/315398/original/file-20200214-11040-1u351pn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=862&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/315398/original/file-20200214-11040-1u351pn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1084&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/315398/original/file-20200214-11040-1u351pn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1084&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/315398/original/file-20200214-11040-1u351pn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1084&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">1896 edition of The Chosen Vessel.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Monash University Library</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Barbara Baynton’s utterly devastating <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/41111545-the-chosen-vessel?from_search=true&qid=OuwKBqhblH&rank=1">The Chosen Vessel</a> (1896) reveals the depths of human malice. A mother is left alone to fend for herself and newborn baby while her husband works elsewhere. She is left vulnerable, and is raped and killed by a lone swagman. </p>
<p>In Baynton’s outback setting, male characters are not protagonists: they are antagonists who belittle and kill. Similar to Clarke’s hostile audience, <a href="https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-319-76917-2_10">readers were troubled</a> by her grim vision.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/refuge-in-a-harsh-landscape-australian-novels-and-our-changing-relationship-to-the-bush-73440">Refuge in a harsh landscape – Australian novels and our changing relationship to the bush</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p>The most celebrated Australian gothic novel is Joan Lindsay’s <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/791345.Picnic_at_Hanging_Rock?from_search=true&qid=PcySMVYt8H&rank=1">Picnic at Hanging Rock</a> (1967), telling the story of the inexplicable disappearance of a group of schoolgirls and their mathematics teacher.</p>
<figure class="align-right ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/315413/original/file-20200214-10991-18n6cak.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/315413/original/file-20200214-10991-18n6cak.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=940&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/315413/original/file-20200214-10991-18n6cak.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=940&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/315413/original/file-20200214-10991-18n6cak.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=940&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/315413/original/file-20200214-10991-18n6cak.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1182&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/315413/original/file-20200214-10991-18n6cak.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1182&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/315413/original/file-20200214-10991-18n6cak.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1182&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The first-edition cover of Picnic at Hanging Rock.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Monash University Library</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Adapted <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0073540/">for the screen</a> by Peter Weir in 1975, Picnic at Hanging Rock plays on the gothic’s romantic sensibility by featuring a number of beautiful young women – pure Botticelli angels – stalked by monsters.</p>
<p>One such monster is the Australian landscape. The film, driven by Russell Boyd’s astute cinematography, suggests it was the rock itself that devoured the schoolgirls and teacher Miss McCraw. </p>
<p>The gothic aesthetic has been especially notable <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/10304310903576358">in Australian cinema</a>. </p>
<p><a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0079482/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1">Long Weekend</a> (1978), <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0093952/?ref_=fn_tt_tt_12">Shame</a> (1988), <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0416315/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1">Wolf Creek</a> (2005) and <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1361843/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1">Van Diemen’s Land</a> (2009) followed in the wake of Weir’s masterpiece. Astonishing landscapes entrap, stymie agency and foster humanity’s worst traits.</p>
<p>Across these texts is the singularly Australian fear of being lost in the bush.</p>
<p>In her book <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17053720-white-vanishing">White Vanishing</a>, Elspeth Tilley argues this fear resonates with white guilt about the attempted genocide of countless Indigenous peoples. Indeed, the gothic genre was a colonial import along with this genocide. </p>
<h2>From silver screen to your headphones</h2>
<p>The Oz Gothic podcast series, <a href="https://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/radio-national-fictions/">out now through the ABC</a>, adds to this long line of a uniquely Australian gothic style. </p>
<p>Produced by Camilla Hannan, Oz Gothic features six distinctive stories by Tony Birch, Maria Tumarkin, Julie Koh, Lachlan Philpott, Alicia Sometimes and Krissy Kneen. Each contributes to this Australian history of gothic storytelling. </p>
<p>The stories traverse the suburbs to rural towns. We hear the voices of women, Indigenous people, and multicultural Australians. </p>
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<figcaption>A preview of Tony Birch’s The Promise </figcaption>
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<p>Ordinary life can have an edge of malice. Some of the stories evoke Baynton’s bleak vision of women’s assault and murder. Others channel influences from <a href="https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/4184-from-the-hitchcock-archives">Hitchcock</a> to <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0067541/">Wake in Fright</a> (1971).</p>
<p>Nothing is exaggerated. The writers capture the truth of humanity’s vulnerability and, in particular, women’s exposure to male violence. The writers invest welcome strains of empathy and compassion for the disenfranchised and dispossessed: they are still the victims of crime, but here empowered to tell their own stories.</p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/how-to-listen-to-podcasts-130882">How to listen to podcasts</a>
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<p>Oz Gothic astonishes in its deft use of sound: high heels echo on loud surfaces; guns discharge from attempted suicides; magpies chortle in small communities; lawnmowers drone and chainsaws buzz in suburban streets. </p>
<p>This pared-back power returns the gothic to its medieval origins, where acoustic language dominated over printed and visual forms. </p>
<p>In the wake of a long history, this new series takes the Australian gothic into new territory.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/131676/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Suzie Gibson does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Australia has a long history of gothic storytelling in literature and cinema. A new podcast series shows how ordinary life can have an edge of malice.Suzie Gibson, Senior Lecturer in English Literature, Charles Sturt UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1117422019-07-03T19:59:50Z2019-07-03T19:59:50ZAustralian Gothic: from Hanging Rock to Nick Cave and Kylie, this genre explores our dark side<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/273441/original/file-20190509-183093-1f0dtf3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">The 'gothic' genre was once thought to be inapplicable to Australia. But there is a strong gothic tradition in Australian literature and film, seen in examples like Picnic at Hanging Rock. </span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">IMDB</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>In the popular imagination, the term “Gothic” evokes images of grim, crumbling castles, wild moors, jagged mountain peaks, and coffins creaking open in labyrinthine underground crypts.</p>
<p>Populating this Gothic terrain are bloodsucking (or, more recently, sparkling) vampires, howling werewolves, ghostly apparitions, black-browed villains, and virginal maidens (<a href="https://twitter.com/pulplibrarian/status/1046421804154261505?lang=en">usually with great hair</a>) fleeing persecution and imprisonment.</p>
<p>Gothic novels, films, and other texts explore the terrors of the unseen, or the half-seen – the repressed matter that threatens to return. Its plots turn on uncertainty and anxiety, sexual danger and desire, inheritance and usurpation, and boundaries and their transgression.</p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/friday-essay-the-female-werewolf-and-her-shaggy-suffragette-sisters-72082">Friday essay: the female werewolf and her shaggy suffragette sisters</a>
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<p>Early Gothic novels, arguably beginning with Horace Walpole’s <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/12923.The_Castle_of_Otranto">The Castle of Otranto</a> in 1764, were the bestsellers of their day.</p>
<p>Ann Radcliffe’s literary hits, such as <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/93134.The_Mysteries_of_Udolpho?from_search=true">The Mysteries of Udolpho</a> (1794), were so popular, particularly among young female readers, that Jane Austen satirised the period’s Gothic craze in <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/50398.Northanger_Abbey?ac=1&from_search=true">Northanger Abbey</a> (1817). </p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/273438/original/file-20190509-183103-8jfley.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/273438/original/file-20190509-183103-8jfley.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/273438/original/file-20190509-183103-8jfley.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=919&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/273438/original/file-20190509-183103-8jfley.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=919&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/273438/original/file-20190509-183103-8jfley.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=919&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/273438/original/file-20190509-183103-8jfley.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1155&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/273438/original/file-20190509-183103-8jfley.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1155&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/273438/original/file-20190509-183103-8jfley.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1155&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<p>The Gothic lives on today in a variety of forms, from books like Stephanie Meyer’s <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/search?q=twilight">Twilight</a> to binge-worthy television shows like <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt6763664/?ref_=nv_sr_1?ref_=nv_sr_1">The Haunting of Hill House</a>.</p>
<h2>An Australian tradition</h2>
<p>For some early commentators, the idea of an Australian Gothic aesthetic was laughable. Australia, given its lack of European history or ivy-covered ruins, couldn’t hope to lay “the foundations of a second ‘Castle of Otranto’”, wrote <a href="http://purl.library.usyd.edu.au/setis/id/p00058">journalist Frederick Sinnett in 1856</a>.</p>
<p>But consider these examples: Albert Tucker’s 1956 painting <a href="https://www.artgallery.nsw.gov.au/collection/works/286.1982/">Apocalyptic Horse</a>; Kenneth Cook’s 1961 novel <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1533656.Wake_in_Fright?from_search=true">Wake in Fright</a>; Joan Lindsay’s <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/791345.Picnic_at_Hanging_Rock?ac=1&from_search=true">Picnic at Hanging Rock</a> and its adaptations; and George Miller’s <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1392190/?ref_=nv_sr_1?ref_=nv_sr_1">Mad Max</a> films.</p>
<p>Or what about Nick Cave and Kylie Minogue’s <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=chF244LWWqg&amp=&start_radio=1&amp=&list=RDchF244LWWqg&amp=&t=8+%22%22">Where the Wild Roses Grow</a>?</p>
<p>These works all belong to an Australian Gothic tradition that took root alongside colonisation.</p>
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<figcaption><span class="caption">Nick Cave and Kylie Minogue - Where the Wild Roses Grow.</span></figcaption>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/how-gothic-buildings-became-associated-with-halloween-and-the-supernatural-67820">How Gothic buildings became associated with Halloween and the supernatural</a>
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<p>The Gothic genre gave early Australian writers and artists a way to explore the dark side of the Australian experience. This included the perceived hostility of the natural environment, the violence of colonisation, convicts’ experiences of exile and entrapment, settlers’ feelings of alienation, and European fears of the racial Other.</p>
<p>In Marcus Clarke’s <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/397046.For_the_Term_of_His_Natural_Life?from_search=true">For the Term of His Natural Life</a> (1874), Henry Lawson’s <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1855137.The_Bush_Undertaker_And_Other_Stories">The Bush Undertaker</a> (1892), and Barbara Baynton’s <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1961204.Bush_Studies?from_search=true">Bush Studies</a> (1902), Australia is not a country of promise and plenty, but rather a menacing and claustrophobic hell. The iconic swagman becomes a monstrous figure, the bush is haunted by a “weird melancholy”, and the landscape imprisons and threatens.</p>
<h2>Contemporary Australian Gothic</h2>
<p>Anxieties about Australia’s colonial past have also been explored more recently in Gothic literature and film. Kate Grenville’s <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/347698.The_Secret_River?from_search=true">The Secret River</a> (2005) returns to the Gothic bush to confront the guilty legacy of colonisation. The novel traces convict William Thornhill’s determination to possess a land plot along the Hawkesbury River, and the desire, fear, and greed that lead him to participate in the massacre of its Aboriginal owners. </p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/273451/original/file-20190509-183089-x1avq1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/273451/original/file-20190509-183089-x1avq1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/273451/original/file-20190509-183089-x1avq1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=931&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/273451/original/file-20190509-183089-x1avq1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=931&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/273451/original/file-20190509-183089-x1avq1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=931&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/273451/original/file-20190509-183089-x1avq1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1170&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/273451/original/file-20190509-183089-x1avq1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1170&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/273451/original/file-20190509-183089-x1avq1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1170&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<p>Indigenous writers such as <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/341920.Alexis_Wright">Alexis Wright</a> and <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/805409.Kim_Scott?from_search=true">Kim Scott</a> have also appropriated the Gothic, overturning tropes that cast Indigenous people as the monstrous Other and instead positioning colonisers as terrifying figures.</p>
<p>The subgenre Tasmanian Gothic (see <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/8864.Richard_Flanagan">Richard Flanagan</a> and <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/4818153.Rohan_Wilson">Rohan Wilson</a>), meanwhile, often reveals anxieties about the colonial genocide of Aboriginal people, and present-day environmental degradation. For example, the extinct Tasmanian Tiger haunts Tasmania’s landscape in the 2011 Daniel Nettheim film <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1703148/?ref_=nv_sr_5?ref_=nv_sr_5">The Hunter</a>, based on the 1999 novel by <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1398605.The_Hunter?ac=1&from_search=true">Julia Leigh</a>.</p>
<p>Australian Gothic increasingly finds new sites to play out its terrors. In Jennifer Kent’s 2014 film <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2321549/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1">The Babadook</a>, the Gothic moves into the urban, domestic space of an Adelaide terrace house where a mother and child are terrorised when the horrifying “Babadook” emerges from a child’s pop-up book. </p>
<p>The film has been read as an <a href="https://torontosun.com/2015/03/04/the-babadook-review-aussie-horror-near-perfect/wcm/58e5c499-e231-41b1-b979-a6a957b0b04d">exploration of grief</a> and the terrors of <a href="https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/the-babadook-2014">childhood and parenting</a>, demonstrating Australian Gothic’s ability to tackle diverse topics.</p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/273435/original/file-20190509-183086-1r30f9g.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/273435/original/file-20190509-183086-1r30f9g.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/273435/original/file-20190509-183086-1r30f9g.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=482&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/273435/original/file-20190509-183086-1r30f9g.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=482&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/273435/original/file-20190509-183086-1r30f9g.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=482&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/273435/original/file-20190509-183086-1r30f9g.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=606&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/273435/original/file-20190509-183086-1r30f9g.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=606&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/273435/original/file-20190509-183086-1r30f9g.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=606&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">Essie Davis in The Babadook, a film which explores gothic themes in suburbia.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Screen Australia/IMDB</span></span>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/friday-essay-why-ya-gothic-fiction-is-booming-and-girl-monsters-are-on-the-rise-95921">Friday essay: why YA gothic fiction is booming - and girl monsters are on the rise</a>
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<p><a href="https://journals.jcu.edu.au/etropic/article/view/3679">Tropical and subtropical Australia</a> have also been portrayed as “Gothic” in the novels of <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/617561.Charades">Janette Turner Hospital</a> and <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1670400.It_s_Raining_in_Mango">Thea Astley</a>, and in the recent Netflix series <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt6898970/?ref_=nv_sr_2?ref_=nv_sr_2">Tidelands</a>, in which supernatural sirens inhabit the waters off the Queensland coast.</p>
<p>As <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1301146.The_Gothic">literary scholars David Punter and Glennis Byron </a> have pointed out, the Gothic genre flourishes at times of upheaval. It allows us to share fears, subvert norms, and point towards what might be overlooked in our history and culture. </p>
<p>Gothic will remain a popular mode for Australian writers, filmmakers, and other artists as long as anxieties about the colonial past, race, gender, and difference remain with us.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/111742/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Emma Doolan does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Gothic texts are not all bloodsucking vampires and howling werewolves. An Australian Gothic tradition took root alongside colonisation, influencing writers from Marcus Clarke to Alexis Wright.Emma Doolan, Lecturer in Creative Writing, Southern Cross UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1020012018-08-30T08:58:21Z2018-08-30T08:58:21ZWhy the Spanish Civil War continues to haunt Gothic literature<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/233913/original/file-20180828-86120-6p2df6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">The ruins of a church in Belchite, Zaragoza, which was devastated during the Spanish Civil War. </span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/church-ruins-civil-war-spain-belchite-1040622382?src=XpEywY7GN6In5LmdYeaznw-1-43">Shutterstock/gonzalovidania</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>The spectre of the Civil War continues to haunt Spain in many different ways. It manifests itself overtly in conflicts over Catalan independence but also more subtly through art, literature and film. Many will remember Guillermo del Toro’s haunting Mexican-Spanish co-productions The Devil’s Backbone (2001) and Pan’s Labyrinth (2006). But it is especially prevalent in the works of writer <a href="https://www.carlosruizzafon.co.uk/">Carlos Ruiz Zafón</a>. His novel The Labyrinth of the Spirits, the last in the international best-selling quartet The Cemetery of Forgotten Books, is being published in English in September. </p>
<p>Those who can read Spanish had access to <a href="http://www.carlosruizzafon.com/en/novelas/el-laberinto-de-los-espiritus.php">El Laberinto de los Espíritus</a> as early as 2016. But as it is just shy of 1,000 pages, it is not surprising it has taken nearly two years for this mammoth conclusion to see the light of day in translation. Its epic proportions, as well as Ruiz Zafón’s usual concoction of suspense, melodrama and humour – all set against a heavily Gothic Barcelona – is sure to delight his readers.</p>
<p>The introduction of a new character, the detective Alicia Gris, also provides some much needed new blood to a series of books that has been steeped in an exploration of the horrors and silences of the <a href="https://theconversation.com/uk/topics/spanish-civil-war-29488">Spanish Civil War</a>. </p>
<h2>The Cemetery of Forgotten Books</h2>
<p>The other volumes in Ruiz Zafón’s quartet, namely The Shadow of the Wind (2001), The Angel’s Game (2008) and The Prisoner of Heaven (2011), are also variously set during the Civil War and its direct aftermath. They each interweave the classic formulae of Gothic literature with a revisionist social realism strongly imbued with the war and Spain’s recovery from it as traumatic event – the perception of which has been affected by <a href="https://www.europeaninterest.eu/article/time-end-francos-legacy-spain/">recent historical and social changes</a>.</p>
<p>As I have argued in <a href="https://www.palgrave.com/us/book/9781137306005">my book on the Spanish Gothic</a>, the fear in these novels is not strictly spectral. It is derived from the war, the subsequent fascist regime and its followers. The Gothic anti-hero in The Shadow of the Wind, Julián Carax, turns out not to be the villain of the novel, but the man who saves the protagonist from the real monster: police officer Fumero. </p>
<p>The Civil War is imagined in all its cruelty and visceral brutality in Ruiz Zafón’s novels. The war is Gothicised as much as its setting, a fallen, rainy and depressed Barcelona which contrasts strongly with images of the city in the contemporary tourist industry. </p>
<p>Even the library that becomes the catalyst of all events – appropriately named the Cemetery of Forgotten Books – stands as a poetic image for those killed in the war. It is described in The Shadow of the Wind as an “endless necropolis” where volumes “remain unexplored, forgotten forever” until rescued by a daring reader who may become their protector. These daring readers are naturally modern day Spaniards, some of whom have been quite literally digging up the dead since the first <a href="https://www.reuters.com/article/us-spain-graves/spanish-archaeologists-dig-up-more-civil-war-dead-from-mass-graves-idUSKCN1BA19X">exhumation of a war mass grave in 2000</a>.</p>
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<h2>‘One doesn’t talk about the war’</h2>
<p>This casual injunction, a phrase I heard often when growing up in Spain in the 1980s and 1990s, may be read as a distillation of the country’s attitude towards a conflict that took place 80 years ago, but which is still very much present in the lives of the Spanish. It is a bit like a ghost, but more like a cursed legacy. It is an echo of “the sins of fathers (being) visited on their children to the third and fourth generation” that Horace Walpole suggested was the main moral of his <a href="http://www.bl.uk/learning/timeline/item126941.html">The Castle of Otranto</a> (1764) – broadly seen as the first Gothic novel. </p>
<p><a href="https://read.dukeupress.edu/poetics-today/article-abstract/28/1/89/20922/Memory-and-Modernity-in-Democratic-Spain-The">It has been suggested</a> that the repression of trauma (a typical Gothic trope) may not be appropriate for the case of the Spanish Civil War. The reason for the relative lateness of the “memory boom” (1990s and 2000s) could be due to a reluctance on the part of those who lived through the conflict to tell their stories. The decision to break with the past after Franco’s death, the argument continues, may have more to do with not wanting to let the past affect the future than with deliberately attempting to silence it.</p>
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<span class="caption">Lluís Companys, the president of Catalonia from 1934 and during the Spanish Civil War.</span>
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<p>However, the conflicts over <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/26/world/europe/spain-catalonia-referendum.html">the Catalan independence vote in 2017 demonstrate</a> that the very idea that the past may not affect the future is not only untenable, but reactionary. This position may inadvertently mask a desire to let the status quo go unchallenged. On this note, it is interesting that Ruiz Zafón’s books are set in Catalonia, a part of Spain with a <a href="https://www.nationalreview.com/2017/10/catalonia-independence-vote-spain-violent-response/">history of resistance to centralist policies</a> and whose president during the War, Lluís Companys, was eventually executed by the regime.</p>
<h2>Spain’s modern Gothic tale</h2>
<p>The Civil War remains Spain’s favourite modern Gothic tale. This is because Spain, as a country, is only beginning to deal with the war’s legacy openly, with its impact on the lives of those directly affected by it. It could not have begun to do so any sooner given that the crimes committed during Francoism <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/jul/12/spain-to-establish-truth-commission-for-franco-era-crimes">have not even been legally recognised, let alone sanctioned</a>. </p>
<p>Whether the past can ever be truly laid to rest is a contentious issue, but it seems to me that only the recognition of its effects – and the way that current discourses around nationalism have been coloured by them – can lead to the end of the type of alienation, fear and anger that Ruiz Zafón and other artists have been working through in their work. We should continue to read and talk about the Civil War and to condemn the brutal acts of murder and repression that have affected Spain for at least three generations. As philosopher George Santayana once warned, “those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it”.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/102001/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Xavier Aldana Reyes does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Failure to deal with the wounds of the conflict has permeated society and culture in Spain.Xavier Aldana Reyes, Senior Lecturer in English Literature and Film, Manchester Metropolitan UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/982712018-06-14T09:21:25Z2018-06-14T09:21:25ZAnthill 26: Twins<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/223039/original/file-20180613-32347-1bze5k.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Double trouble? </span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">shutterstock.com</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Double trouble, two peas in a pod, always together and possibly even reading each other’s minds – twins come with tonnes of stereotypes. This episode of The Anthill digs into some of the research around twins – from what it’s like to be one, how it differs to other sibling relationships (if at all) and how twins play a crucial role in scientific research.</p>
<p>As well as speaking to some twins to find out some of their pet peeves about how the world views their relationship, we speak to the University of Central Lancashire’s Kate Bacon about the extent that the identity of twins is shaped by being a twin. And psychologist Alison Pike at Sussex University gives us an overview of how twins compare to other siblings.</p>
<p>Then we explore just how much stereotypes of twins abound in popular culture. As Xavier Aldana Reyes, senior lecturer in English literature and film at Manchester Metropolitan University, told us, Gothic literature and horror films <a href="https://theconversation.com/seeing-double-the-origins-of-the-evil-twin-in-gothic-horror-and-hollywood-98196">have embraced the idea</a> of the “evil twin”. Think The Shining. </p>
<p>In films or photographs, twins are usually dressed the same and are incredibly close. But as James Hoctor, from the University of Kent’s department of philosophy told us, these depictions of twins affect how they’re viewed in the real world – and this can be damaging.</p>
<p>Aside from their use in the plot lines of scary films, twins are helping scientists understand the human condition, and particularly the impact of our genes on our lives. To find out more we spoke to three scientists who work with large scale twin databases. </p>
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<span class="caption">Twins are helping scientists understand ageing.</span>
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<p>Claire Steves, a senior clinical lecturer at King’s College London, which runs the Twins UK database explained what they’ve found out comparing identical and non-identical twins. Kaare Christensen, head of the Danish Twin Registry at the University of Southern Denmark, tells us about how twins studies are revealing insights into how we age – and when we die. And Athula Sumithapala, professor of psychiatry at the University of Keele, tells us about a new twins registry he and colleagues are setting up in Sri Lanka, and why more twin databases are needed in the developing world. </p>
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<p><em>The Anthill theme music is by Alex Grey for Melody Loops. Music in the twins and popular culture segment is <a href="https://incompetech.com/music/royalty-free/index.html?isrc=USUAN1100254">Double Drift</a> by Kevin MacLeod via Incompetech. Music in the twin studies segment is Old Bossa by <a href="http://www.twinmusicom.org/">Twin Musicom</a>, via <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ecKkW_hK8xE">YouTube</a>.</em> </p>
<p><em>Click here to listen to more episodes of The Anthill, on themes including <a href="https://theconversation.com/anthill-22-sex-91797">Sex</a>, <a href="https://theconversation.com/anthill-25-intuition-96677">Intuition</a>, and <a href="https://theconversation.com/anthill-9-when-scientists-experiment-on-themselves-71852">Scientists who experiment on themselves</a>.</em></p>
<p><em>Thank you to City, University of London’s Department of Journalism for letting us use their studios to record The Anthill.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/98271/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
A podcast on twins, including why stereotypes about their relationship are so damaging, and why they are so useful to scientists.Laura Hood, Senior Politics Editor, Assistant Editor, The Conversation (UK edition)Annabel Bligh, Business & Economy Editor and Podcast Producer, The Conversation UKGemma Ware, Head of AudioLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/851892017-10-30T16:20:18Z2017-10-30T16:20:18ZTrick or treat? A guide to Halloween’s hidden (and not so hidden) gems<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/190643/original/file-20171017-30394-coekqu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/halloween-pumpkin-mystic-forest-night-322226735?src=6qisbV3e4KEztL4SZ4q1Tw-1-4">RomoloTavani/Shutterstock</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Despite concerns that Halloween celebrations might be one more concession to the rampant commercialisation of seasonal change, it would seem that more and more people are warming up to this imported unofficial holiday. Sales of pumpkins rose by 20% in October of 2013 and they are <a href="https://www.cnbc.com/2017/09/05/pumpkin-season-is-officially-here-but-excitement-this-year-may-be-slowing.html">projected to rise by another 6%</a> this year in the UK. While still considerably behind the average American, Britons nevertheless managed to spend a whopping £310m on Halloween in 2016 – 5% more than in 2015. </p>
<p>So in the spirit of the season, I wanted to suggest some of my favourite books and films about Halloween. They will hopefully help sceptical readers understand why some people are so passionate about the season of monster confectionery, horror reruns and skull crockery. For those who already love Halloween, these recommendations are 100% treat and 0% trick, and certainly worth revisiting.</p>
<h2>The Legend of Sleepy Hollow</h2>
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<span class="caption">Washington Irving (1783-1859). American author of classic short stories The Legend of Sleepy Hollow and Rip Van Winkle.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.shutterstock.com/image-illustration/washington-irving-17831859-american-author-classic-239399287?src=tdu88W2CHOlJlExBNUAHMA-1-35">EverettHistorical/Shutterstock</a></span>
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<p>This <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/93261.The_Legend_of_Sleepy_Hollow">classic story</a> from Washington Irving is not about Halloween, but has come to be associated with it. The tale of a superstitious schoolmaster driven out of town by the apparition of a headless horseman, Sleepy Hollow contains a number of elements and images that evoke this holiday. For one thing, events take place on a dark autumn night during harvest time after an evening spent telling “stories of ghosts and goblins”. For another, Sleepy Hollow ends with a conspicuous pumpkin and a great scare. If you like it, try Tim Burton’s 1999 adaptation. </p>
<h2>The Halloween Tree</h2>
<p>This is the quintessential novel about Halloween for young and old. <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/761381.The_Halloween_Tree?from_search=true">The Halloween Tree</a> follows the adventures of eight children as they try to save their friend Pipkin on a journey that takes them through the whole history of Halloween, from ancient Egypt to the Middle Ages and even Mexico and its <a href="https://www.nationalgeographic.org/media/dia-de-los-muertos/">Day of the Dead</a>. In the novel, Ray Bradbury manages to capture the magical excitement of Halloween without refusing to acknowledge the nostalgic aspects of the autumn. If the novel’s briefness leaves you wanting more, try the carnival rides of Bradbury’s Something Wicked This Way Comes or the macabre short stories in <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_October_Country">The October Country</a>.</p>
<h2>Trick ‘r Treat</h2>
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<p>This 2007 American-Canadian movie made anthology horror films exciting again, and it came as a surprise to those who had long hoped for a fun Halloween screamer. <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0862856/">Trick ‘r Treat</a> is original, scary and made with a palpable love of all things Halloween. It is made up of four independent stories, featuring new and ironic takes on traditional monsters like the vengeful ghost or the werewolf. The tales are interconnected by Sam – a burlap sack-wearing, trick-or-treater child figure who appears to those who break Halloween traditions. Despite never receiving a wide theatrical release, Trick ‘r Treat soon became a cult film that spawned two comics and a forthcoming sequel.</p>
<h2>October Dreams</h2>
<p>The award-winning book <a href="https://www.amazon.co.uk/October-Dreams-Celebration-Halloween-Various/dp/0451458958">October Dreams: A Celebration of Halloween</a> is possibly the biggest (at over 640 pages) and best modern Halloween-themed anthology. Expect modern twists on trick-or-treating, pumpkin-carving, mask-wearing, witching-houring and general spooking around from a host of top authors. </p>
<h2>Halloween III: Season of the Witch</h2>
<p>A <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0085636/">cult horror film</a> and interesting curio. Although billed as the third in the famous slasher series, this 1982 film is a standalone entry. Its plot about the sacrifice of children in a Celtic ritual echoes Halloween’s origins in <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/religion/religions/paganism/holydays/samhain.shtml">Samhain</a> – the Celtic festival that marked the end of the harvest season (and included no murders.). In the movie, novelty Silver Shamrock masks act as receivers of killer signals from flashy television adverts.</p>
<h2>The Shadow at the Bottom of the World</h2>
<p>For those who may find that all the fanfare and histrionics of these Halloween texts and films pervert the true spirit of what should, by right, be a dark and sombre season, try <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/219596.The_Shadow_at_the_Bottom_of_the_World">Thomas Ligotti’s long story</a>, available in <a href="https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B00TY3ZOLE/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1">Songs of a Dead Dreamer and Grimscribe</a>. A warning to the curious, though: Ligotti’s soul-crushing rendition of the autumn is a powerful one, so handle it with care.</p>
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<h2>The Nightmare Before Christmas</h2>
<p>And finally, it may be well known but I simply could not leave out this film. Like many other holiday movies that have become traditions in themselves, watching <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0107688/">The Nightmare before Christmas</a> on the run-up to Halloween is now compulsory in my household. Originally developed from a poem by Tim Burton, the film takes place in Halloween Town. Its leader, Jack Skellington, becomes enamoured with a very different celebration after accidentally stumbling upon Christmas Town. Thankfully, his botched attempt at replacing Santa only reignites his passion for Halloween.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/85189/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Xavier Aldana Reyes does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>A guide to some lesser known treats to read and watch over Halloween.Xavier Aldana Reyes, Senior Lecturer in English Literature and Film, Manchester Metropolitan UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/773742017-05-19T11:33:35Z2017-05-19T11:33:35ZHag, temptress or feminist icon? The witch in popular culture<p>You would have thought that Western society might have grown out of the habit of portraying powerful women as witches, but a trope that usually ended badly for women in the Middle Ages is still being used in the 21st century. Those who portrayed Hillary Clinton <a href="https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/hillary-clinton-confusingly-accused-of-satanism-thanks-to-marina-abramovic-email">as a witch</a> during the 2016 presidential campaign, or have given Theresa May a pointy hat and broomstick in Britain’s general election, may not be calling for them to be burned at the stake, but they do call down political destruction on their heads.</p>
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<p>Witches have featured in fairy tales and fiction for centuries. In her earliest incarnations, the witch served as a warning. Stories about the witch-as-hag demonised and punished women for attempting to exert power outside the bounds of the domestic sphere. Beyond the fairy tale, women with “occult” knowledge (of folk medicine, for example), or simply poor, social outcasts (such as the infamous <a href="http://www.pendlewitches.co.uk/">Pendle Witches</a> hanged at Lancaster castle in 1612), were the victims of persecution and prosecution in 16th and 17th-century Britain.</p>
<p>Nowadays, though, the witch is <a href="https://qz.com/535433/witches-are-some-of-the-most-enduring-feminist-icons-of-our-time/">often praised as a feminist figure</a>, who pushes boundaries, breaks the rules and punishes patriarchal authority. Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s Willow Rosenberg (Alyson Hannigan) and Disney’s Maleficant (Angelina Jolie) (2014) are two oft-cited examples of the feminist witch.</p>
<p>In preparation for an upcoming academic conference on “<a href="https://gothicfeminism.com/">Gothic feminism</a>”, I have been researching these contrasting representations of the witch. Which witch (sorry!) does our popular culture currently favour? And can stories about the witch really be reclaimed as feminist parables?</p>
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<p>The witch was a recurring feature of horror film in the 1960s and 1970s. British <a href="http://www.bfi.org.uk/news-opinion/news-bfi/features/where-begin-folk-horror">folk horror</a> films such as The Blood on Satan’s Claw (1971) and The Wicker Man (1973) offer deeply ambivalent representations of the witch. In The Blood on Satan’s Claw, teenage temptress, Angel Blake (Linda Hayden) seems to be an anti-authoritarian heroine – the 1960s flower power movement transported to 17th-century England. But in the end she is killed by male authority figures after she oversees the rape and murder of one of her school friends. In contrast, The Wicker Man’s siren, Willow MacGregor (Britt Eckland), gleefully triumphs over the stern Christian policeman, Sergeant Howie (Edward Woodward).</p>
<h2>Wildly feminist</h2>
<p>The way witches are portrayed on screen has been refashioned many times over the decades. From 1964 to 1972, ABC’s Bewitched turned the witch into the subject of a suburban sitcom as domesticated Samantha (Elizabeth Montgomery) used her magic to serve her try-hard husband. The late 20th century favoured soft focus, “white” witchcraft, epitomised by the popular American television series, Charmed (1998 - 2006). More recently, the witch has taken on an explicitly Gothic guise. The big-budget TV series, American Horror Story: Coven (2013), Penny Dreadful (2015), and Game of Thrones (2011-) represent witches as glamorous and beautiful, but also suggest that their sexuality is deadly.</p>
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<p>In cinema, Robert Eggers’ award-winning feature, The Witch (2016), returned to the folk horror genre in its stark portrayal of a Puritan family struggling to survive in 17th-century New England. The film’s bare aesthetic slips into nightmarish horror as it restages the American <a href="https://theconversation.com/the-witch-the-facts-behind-the-folktales-56233">folk tale</a> of the witch in the woods to a particularly gruesome conclusion.</p>
<p>The film received a lot of plaudits, particularly from feminist cultural commentators. A recent article on film website <a href="http://lwlies.com/articles/witch-new-wave-the-love-witch/">Little White Lies</a> praises The Witch as a “feminist horror fantasy” that “celebrate[s] the inherent power of femininity”. Likewise, <a href="https://www.wired.com/2016/02/the-witch-demonization-women/">Wired magazine</a> called the film “wildly feminist”.</p>
<h2>Disempowering women</h2>
<p>However, there is another side to the witch. Mary Beard, in a recent lecture, <a href="https://www.lrb.co.uk/v39/n06/mary-beard/women-in-power">Women in Power</a>, argued that stories of monstrous women and witches dating back to antiquity, such as the tale of the Medusa, are parables aimed at disempowering women. </p>
<p>Over and again, such stories seek to reinforce the male right to defeat female (ab)users of power, suggesting that women are not entitled to power in the first place – and there’s been much of that in the way both Clinton and May have been portrayed as witches. </p>
<p>The Witch acknowledges this history in its return to the folk horror tradition. Early in the film, a witch pounds the flesh of a dead baby into a paste. Yet at the end of the film, the teenage heroine, Tomasin, agrees to join the witches who had so gruesomely murdered her baby brother. Even though these hags cause the deaths of the rest of Tomasin’s family, their offer of “some butter” and a “pretty dress” seems far preferable to the harsh strictures of Puritan life.</p>
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<p>What freedom and power is there in becoming a witch? Joining the witches is Tomasin’s last, desperate resort and it places her forever on the outside of a patriarchal social system in need of reform by and for its female members. More than this, Tomasin becomes one of the gruesome hags who have murdered her baby brother. In this respect, The Witch echoes old misogynist fairy tales, which often feature actual or attempted infanticide, as much as it revels in the witch’s power to destroy an authoritarian patriarch. </p>
<p>Eggers’ complex depiction is not a roadmap to female empowerment. A glimpsed-at moment of freedom (an aerial broomstick ride) for Tomasin occurs on the outside of acceptable social spaces – deep in the woods and far from civilisation. At the same time, the murderous witches continue to communicate centuries-old patriarchal fears about female power.</p>
<p>As scholars, it’s tempting to see our favourite genres and cultural products as proof texts for our politics – but Gothic horror, in particular, has always refused that role. Its monsters do not act as representatives for either the right or the left of politics, but instead slide troublingly between the poles. Given the current lurch to the right in Western politics – and the rise of anti-feminist sentiments – the ambiguity of the witch is perhaps even something to be wary of rather than to celebrate. Though she seems to be a powerful figure for feminists, we cannot forget the witch’s origins as a figure used to delegitimise powerful women and locate them on the outside of society.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/77374/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Chloe Germaine Buckley does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Independent, powerful feminist role models or a warning to women not to overstep the mark? Witches have been many things over the years.Chloe Germaine Buckley, Senior lecturer in English, Manchester Metropolitan UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/678202016-10-30T16:05:42Z2016-10-30T16:05:42ZHow Gothic buildings became associated with Halloween and the supernatural<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/143814/original/image-20161030-15775-a192rc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Brodie castle, north Scotland. </span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/51652977@N00/6288150940/in/photolist-azEqcw-8as5mZ-8LRERv-5dnFa9-pPaQhx-dTgdVr-b8RXdi-nmK4xV-nmJA8M-npwzBa-725dtj-3uRKg-7bKqLF-3uREs-4r38ET-nDfhkR-rafJk-P27ad-nBbSQf-nBbMzf-nG14Q1-nmJQBh-npwNNc-nmJBs9-riHSrw-osV3RH-ykatn-nPiB3f-pBkaMx-3dHMge-5weuMQ-jSn8d-8fgYAZ-o6dg5U-nD1E9Y-61AiG7-mQMkC-MPcqL-BTk8Z-nDdBrG-5Jhzcc-nmJGoS-8izygo-3dN8yj-7bPfwu-pgZERy-7bKrva-tqVp6-npwMC5-9zHHcL">Albert de Bruijn</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/">CC BY-SA</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>If you want foreboding old buildings that dark lords and werewolves are bound to frequent, look no further than Britain’s enviable Gothic architecture. From <a href="http://www.strawberryhillhouse.org.uk">Strawberry Hill</a> in London with its twisting corridors and glaring pinnacles, to ruined abbeys and cathedrals such as <a href="https://www.historicenvironment.scot/visit-a-place/places/st-andrews-cathedral/">St Andrews</a> and <a href="https://www.historicenvironment.scot/visit-a-place/places/jedburgh-abbey/">Jedburgh</a>, darkness seems to thrive in these places – the perfect location for a Halloween party if you’re lucky enough to be invited. </p>
<p>What is often not appreciated is that this style had two distinct periods of glory, with a long time out of favour in between. And it’s not just their tall spires and endless corridors and gargoyles that brought these structures supernatural associations. The dark reputation they gained in their wilderness years helped, too. </p>
<p>Gothic was in its pomp in medieval and Tudor Britain. Famous examples include <a href="http://www.salisburycathedral.org.uk">Salisbury cathedral</a> in southern England, <a href="http://www.caernarfon-castle.co.uk">Caernarfon castle</a> in Wales and <a href="http://www.dupontcastle.com/castles/melrose.htm">Melrose castle</a> and <a href="http://www.nts.org.uk/Property/Brodie-Castle/">Brodie castle</a> in Scotland. The style was used by church, state and universities, Oxford and Cambridge especially. It was certainly not associated with terror in this period – more with the potential perils of sin and Purgatory, or the rigours of academia. </p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/143822/original/image-20161030-15779-12tzh10.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/143822/original/image-20161030-15779-12tzh10.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/143822/original/image-20161030-15779-12tzh10.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/143822/original/image-20161030-15779-12tzh10.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/143822/original/image-20161030-15779-12tzh10.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/143822/original/image-20161030-15779-12tzh10.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/143822/original/image-20161030-15779-12tzh10.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/143822/original/image-20161030-15779-12tzh10.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Christ Church cathedral, Oxford.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://www.cas.org.uk/publications/taking-temperature">Peter Lindfield</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Gothic waned in the 17th century, replaced by the round-arched and rationalised style of Classicism. Imported from the continent and inspired by ancient Greece and Rome, the new style came to prominence in London public and private works such as the <a href="http://www.hrp.org.uk/banqueting-house/#gs.0orGKII">Banqueting House</a>, Whitehall and <a href="http://www.rmg.co.uk/queens-house">The Queen’s House</a>, Greenwich. </p>
<p>Classicism continued to spread in the 18th century, while Gothic came to be seen as barbaric. It was intentionally connected with the Goths by critics who favoured Greek and Roman architecture. These included the Renaissance artists <a href="http://letteraturaartistica.blogspot.com/2014/12/letter-to-pope-leo-x.html">Raphael</a> and <a href="http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/mgot/hd_mgot.htm">Vasari</a>, and Georgian intellectuals such as <a href="http://www.doaks.org/resources/publications/doaks-online-publications/evelyn/evel008.pdf">John Evelyn</a> and architects like <a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=5SgbDQAAQBAJ&pg=PA66&lpg=PA66&dq=isaac+ware+gothic&source=bl&ots=1sYWVcCgHI&sig=_DSyUTrtCUCafkc-KCIUMEdk3TY&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwibpunDqYHQAhVI_mMKHXDWD8sQ6AEIIzAB#v=onepage&q=isaac%20ware%20gothic&f=false">Isaac Ware</a> (Ware would <a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=7ejh1RnNDt4C&pg=PA69&lpg=PA69&dq=isaac+ware+gothic&source=bl&ots=G6pvPp5VvV&sig=TsgfirlkWnp806Lwir6q0n4835w&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwibpunDqYHQAhVI_mMKHXDWD8sQ6AEIKTAD#v=onepage&q=isaac%20ware%20gothic&f=false">later introduce</a> certain Gothic elements into his work). These people <a href="http://www.gothic.stir.ac.uk/blog/peter-lindfield/what-is-gothic-from-gothic-mooc/">often</a> argued that when the Goths <a href="http://penelope.uchicago.edu/%7Egrout/encyclopaedia_romana/greece/paganism/sack.html">sacked Rome</a> in the fifth century, they destroyed “proper” Classical architecture and introduced a backward, coarse style – Gothic – in its place. </p>
<p>In the first half of the 18th century in particular, almost all the major architects promoted Classicism. As the Scottish minister and writer Alexander Gerard <a href="http://www.earthworks.org/sublime/Gerard/index.html">put it</a> in 1759:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>the profusion of ornament, bestowed on the parts, in Gothic structures, may please one who has not acquired enlargement of mind … where refinement is wanting, taste must be coarse and vulgar. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>Worse still in those days, Gothic was associated with the Catholics. Catholicism in the 1700s was viewed with suspicion and concern, thanks partly to the <a href="http://www.educationscotland.gov.uk/scotlandshistory/jacobitesenlightenmentclearances/jacobiterisings/">Jacobite risings</a>. Both were considered a threat to the <a href="http://yesterday.uktv.co.uk/history/classic-history/kings-and-queens/article/hanoverians-1714-1837/">Hanoverian</a> and Classical order – never mind that the great medieval abbeys spared destruction in the Reformation had been put into the service of the Protestant church. </p>
<h2>Torchbearers</h2>
<p>Gothic was not cast aside entirely, however. One leading enthusiast was writer and historian Horace Walpole, the youngest son of Sir Robert, Britain’s first prime minister. In 1748 he <a href="http://www.gothic.stir.ac.uk/uncategorized/gothic-architecture-from-the-gothic-mooc/">redeveloped</a> Strawberry Hill, a collection of 17th-century tenement houses in London which are now known as the most important mid-Georgian example of Gothic Revival.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/143788/original/image-20161030-15799-h4wrxl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/143788/original/image-20161030-15799-h4wrxl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/143788/original/image-20161030-15799-h4wrxl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/143788/original/image-20161030-15799-h4wrxl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/143788/original/image-20161030-15799-h4wrxl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/143788/original/image-20161030-15799-h4wrxl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/143788/original/image-20161030-15799-h4wrxl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/143788/original/image-20161030-15799-h4wrxl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Strawberry Hill in Twickenham.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/pt101/5325341150/in/photolist-97zLoJ-oUpctT-8YAAAG-oU8sGX-8Yxyi4-FLqGFf-oUnkuy-cVj6V5-Gbx4Mn-4Fkj8g-8YAAQh-8YxyeP-8YxxdZ-8YxxpD-8YAzLA-G5FFCM-cVj6xy-8YAzNE-8YAzx7-cVjeHG-8YAzVG-8YAzXY-8YAz2d-8YAA3y-s5xrgp-rz2dbH-G9fiKj-8YAAdG-8YxyX2-8Yxy5x-8YAzTq-8YAzrf-oUnpUL-ryTCEY-ryTHiW-4FkikP-8YxyFi-8YAAnY-8YAAbJ-4FkjqV-8YxxDD-8Yxytr-ryUHtL-cVjbJL-8Yxx92-8YAA9Q-qUFgJM-8Yxxrn-8YxyS4-FggVFD">Paul Williams</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/">CC BY-SA</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Walpole’s choices were rooted in a love of medieval architecture and genealogy. He presented his project as realising the castle of his ancestors, painting their coats of arms on the walls of the house’s armoury, for example. </p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/143789/original/image-20161030-15821-1q5rzfq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/143789/original/image-20161030-15821-1q5rzfq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/143789/original/image-20161030-15821-1q5rzfq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=752&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/143789/original/image-20161030-15821-1q5rzfq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=752&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/143789/original/image-20161030-15821-1q5rzfq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=752&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/143789/original/image-20161030-15821-1q5rzfq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=945&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/143789/original/image-20161030-15821-1q5rzfq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=945&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/143789/original/image-20161030-15821-1q5rzfq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=945&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Horace Walpole by John Giles Eccardt (1754).</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Horace_Walpole_by_John_Giles_Eccardt.jpg#/media/File:Horace_Walpole_by_John_Giles_Eccardt.jpg">Wikimedia</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Gothic’s grim associations meanwhile found an outlet in its other notable form in Georgian Britain, the Gothic novel. Horace Walpole was again a pioneer. <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/12923.The_Castle_of_Otranto">The Castle of Otranto</a> (1764) tells of incest, brutality and deceit and is set within what we can only interpret as a Gothic structure. Subsequent authors from <a href="https://www.britannica.com/biography/Ann-Radcliffe-English-author">Ann Radcliffe</a> to <a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/books/authors/10-facts-about-Bram-Stoker/">Bram Stoker</a> also located terrifying scenes and ghastly encounters in and around such buildings. </p>
<p>The form became so popular that an anonymous letter <a href="http://recipes.hypotheses.org/7219">published in</a> The Spirit of the Public Journals for 1797 proposed a satirical “formula” for writing a Gothic novel. It highlights the centrality of Gothic structures to the genre:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Take — An old castle, half of it ruinous.<br>
A long gallery, with a great many doors, some secret ones.<br>
Three murdered bodies, quite fresh.<br>
As many skeletons, in chests and presses.<br>
An old woman hanging by the neck; with her throat cut.<br>
Assassins and desperadoes <em>quant suff</em>.<br>
Noise, whispers, and groans, threescore at least.</p>
</blockquote>
<h2>The second coming</h2>
<p>Then in the 19th century, Gothic made a stylistic comeback. This was helped by antiquaries in the mid-Georgian period who <a href="https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/S0003581511000047">had studied</a> Gothic works and treated them as part of Britain’s architectural heritage. </p>
<p>By the time the Palace of Westminster was almost completely destroyed <a href="http://www.parliament.uk/about/living-heritage/building/palace/architecture/palacestructure/great-fire/">by fire</a> in 1834, fashions had come full circle. For a <a href="http://www.parliament.uk/about/living-heritage/building/palace/architecture/palacestructure/rebuilding-palace/">competition</a> to commission a new building, the <a href="https://books.google.com.mx/books?id=WrcDAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA262&dq=those+venerable+and+beautiful+remains+of+antiquity,+the+cloisters+and+the+Crypt+of+St.+Stephen%E2%80%99s+Chapel&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiE-vz1joDQAhUI_4MKHUTsCtQQ6AEIHTAA#v=onepage&q=those%20venerable%20and%20beautiful%20remains%20of%20antiquity%2C%20the%20cloisters%20and%20the%20Crypt%20of%20St.%20Stephen%E2%80%99s%20Chapel&f=false">brief said</a> it had to be “either Gothic or Elizabethan”. It had to preserve “those venerable and beautiful remains of [Gothic] antiquity, the cloisters and the Crypt of St. Stephen’s Chapel”. </p>
<p>One supporter <a href="https://books.google.com.mx/books?id=WbcDAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA198&lpg=PA198&dq=It+is+the+architecture+of+our+history+and+our+romance.+Our+kings+of+old+held+court+in+Gothic+structures&source=bl&ots=eX9_bdw6zp&sig=vIDakCak8GzfFJhRzmAq7f6V-T4&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjBtry2joDQAhXC7oMKHVCzCugQ6AEIHTAA#v=onepage&q=It%20is%20the%20architecture%20of%20our%20history%20and%20our%20romance.%20Our%20kings%20of%20old%20held%20court%20in%20Gothic%20structures&f=false">argued</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Gothic is eminently English in every respect … It is the architecture of our history and our romance. Our kings of old held court in Gothic structures. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>Dissenting voices such as the scientist and thinker WR Hamilton <a href="https://books.google.com.mx/books?id=eIlAAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA122&dq=may+possibly+throw+us+back+to+the+middle+ages&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjuot7MjoDQAhUJyoMKHX0zC3kQ6AEIHTAA#v=onepage&q=may%20possibly%20throw%20us%20back%20to%20the%20middle%20ages&f=false">believed</a> this revival “may possibly throw us back to the middle ages”, but for the next few decades they were ignored. Gothic revivalism went hand in hand with top-hatted Victorians and their fixations with death and religion. We can still see the results in the likes of monuments to <a href="https://www.royalparks.org.uk/parks/kensington-gardens/things-to-see-and-do/memorials,-fountains-and-statues/the-albert-memorial">Prince Albert</a> in London, and <a href="http://www.edinburghmuseums.org.uk/venues/scott-monument">Sir Walter Scott</a> in Edinburgh. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/143791/original/image-20161030-15793-byvq6u.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/143791/original/image-20161030-15793-byvq6u.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/143791/original/image-20161030-15793-byvq6u.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/143791/original/image-20161030-15793-byvq6u.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/143791/original/image-20161030-15793-byvq6u.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/143791/original/image-20161030-15793-byvq6u.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/143791/original/image-20161030-15793-byvq6u.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/143791/original/image-20161030-15793-byvq6u.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Scott monument, Edinburgh.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/chrisaitken/6193297852/in/photolist-arhgFs-acQW7n-5qfZD3-69DDRz-8Zx1z-d3jRQh-ekTwoP-9Udxuf-ekZid9-2jQLAd-knHzEi-eBgRi6-8kJCed-dUp681-didyS-rpEZt-6ig8iW-nR1brs-e6CGFU-ah3dEJ-e6CLds-bjJzF1-aRmfpa-e7kGMu-dC6TSa-e7kGny-nQwzR-8h2xdo-4RN5zz-5qbEfX-eBgR5T-dUpiQm-6rBtCQ-bPkJbr-6PR35u-4am8tr-8mdEoc-8mgQqh-5jwLxV-LGyNf-5YwPN1-2YCEms-7H9shC-8DvqTS-bwCEZS-pFj5HP-4RSfR9-o4LJb-eBgQBt-8Dzw3v">ChrisA1995</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/">CC BY-SA</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>When Gothic fell out of favour a second time in the late 19th/early 20th centuries, it was because of the availability of new materials such as glass and steel – and new priorities, such as functionality. Suggestions of Gothic barbarism and un-Britishness were left in the past. Ominous turrets and groaning archways may sometimes seem best suited to the sets of Dracula movies, but these glorious structures will always have a treasured place in British heritage.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/67820/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Peter Lindfield receives funding from the AHRC. </span></em></p>How medieval spires and snarling gargoyles went out of fashion and then made a spectacular return under – you guessed it – the Victorians.Peter Lindfield, Post-Doctoral Researcher. Literature and Languages, University of StirlingLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/630252016-08-02T08:50:12Z2016-08-02T08:50:12ZThe Living and the Dead captures Victorian anxieties about science and the supernatural<p>From telegraphs to television sets, new technologies have often been imagined as strange or magical in the popular consciousness. It is no coincidence that developments in 19th century science and technology like the railway, the phonograph, and the photograph coincided with a deep cultural fascination with the paranormal. Discussions of <a href="https://theconversation.com/how-the-victorians-brought-famous-artists-back-from-the-dead-in-seances-62647">seances</a>, spirit mediums and purported photos of ghosts were found in the newspapers of the day, and science was used to either try to prove or repudiate the claims. These feverish times are the setting for BBC One’s supernatural drama <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p03wv2rl">The Living and the Dead</a>. </p>
<p>In the opening episode, pioneering photographer Charlotte Appleby (played by Charlotte Spencer) reflects in wonder that “You could be dead and buried a hundred years, and people could still hear what you sounded like” while listening to phonograph recordings of people from the Somerset village of Shepzoy. It is 1894, and she and her psychologist husband Nathan (played by Colin Morgan) have moved to the village to take charge of the family estate.</p>
<p>Her enthusiasm for this new medium is quickly dampened, however, when the voice of Nathan’s young son who tragically drowned fills the room, urging his father to join him in play. Various other paranormal events soon follow. Ghostly voices emerging from the phonograph are replicated by a young woman who claims to have been possessed by the spirit of a local man who died without having been baptised. A railway survey unleashes the unquiet souls of five boys who died in a mine collapse. The ghosts of roundhead cavalrymen descend. And there is the curious apparition of a woman with what viewers recognise as an iPad – presumably too absorbed in her screen to notice that she has wandered into the 19th century.</p>
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<h2>Gothic horrors</h2>
<p>Series creator Ashley Pharoah described the series as “<a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/tv/2016/06/28/the-living-and-the-dead-is-thomas-hardy-with-ghosts--and-time-tr/">Hardy with ghosts</a>”. In many ways, the village of Shepzoy is a new take on Thomas Hardy’s fictional county of Wessex which, modelled on the counties of England’s southwest, self-consciously captured the tensions between the city and country at the moment the transformations brought by the railways and the industrial revolution began to unfold.</p>
<p>Charlotte distinctly resembles <a href="http://www.bustle.com/articles/171552-bathsheba-everdene-is-literatures-forgotten-feminist-hero">Bathsheba Everdene</a>, the spirited young woman who inherits and manages her uncle’s farm in Hardy’s Far from the Madding Crowd (1874). The introduction of new machinery and farming techniques to Shepzoy is met with similar distrust and even satanic associations as they are in Tess of the D’Urbervilles (1891). But ultimately the series has more in common with the Gothic tales of the same period, such as The Turn of the Screw (1898) by American writer <a href="https://www.britannica.com/biography/Henry-James-American-writer">Henry James</a> – in fact, the younger brother of William James, a leading early psychologist – or the short stories of In a Glass Darkly (1872) by <a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/11048229/Sheridan-Le-Fanu-the-father-of-modern-horror-at-200.html">Sheridan Le Fanu</a>, in which self-consciously modern individuals find themselves powerless against dark supernatural forces.</p>
<p>The tense phonograph scene from The Living and the Dead gives an indication of its writer’s engagement with these Gothic themes. And the same motif of strange objects – technological, mystical, or ambiguously situated between the two – that allow the voices of the dead to come to life is one that recurs frequently in the fictions of the time. </p>
<p>For example, in <a href="http://www.eastoftheweb.com/short-stories/UBooks/JapBox.shtml">The Japanned Box</a> (1899) by <a href="http://www.biography.com/people/arthur-conan-doyle-9278600">Sir Arthur Conan Doyle</a> a mysterious woman’s voice, thought to be a ghostly emanation, is revealed to have been produced by a phonograph. In <a href="http://www.biography.com/people/rudyard-kipling-9365581">Rudyard Kipling’s</a> Wireless (1902), mechanical signals inadvertently channel the creative spirit and poetry of the long-dead Keats. In <a href="http://www.sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/mclandburgh_florence">Florence McLandburgh’s</a> The Automaton Ear (1873), an unnamed professor invents a device able to detect sounds beyond the limits of the human ear – only to be haunted by the now-audible cries of the dead.</p>
<p>In each instance, the scientific instrument in question establishes a threshold between life and death, offering the simultaneously exhilarating and terrifying possibility of passing between the two. The human body and mind become peculiarly vulnerable beyond that threshold, while the stories point also to the limits of scientific knowledge at the time and its capacity to explain the world. </p>
<h2>Technology or totem?</h2>
<p>Communications technologies such as the penny post, the railway, the telegraph, telephone and wireless radio receiver shrunk the distances between people in ways that seemed impossible. For those first witnessing them, they created a powerful sense of removal from the material world, permitting experiences that seemed beyond the realms of normal consciousness and corporeality.</p>
<p>At the same time, new technology provided the means to preserve the past: the phonograph could capture and replay the voices of the dead, the photograph could record their lifelike image, while the then burgeoning science of psychology provided doctors with new ways to consider past versions of the self, and access to the unconscious mind. These anxieties and tensions are invoked in The Living and the Dead in a way that those of the period would have recognised, with the past, present and future drawn together through technology and the supernatural. As the web of connections between individuals in Shepzoy deepens, it becomes increasingly unclear who is being haunted, and who is the ghost.</p>
<p>The plot device of time periods that bleed into one another is one Pharaoh has used in previous series <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0478942/">Life on Mars</a> and <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1008108">Ashes to Ashes</a>, but perhaps here he has found more suitable material upon which to graft it – after all, the fracturing of the laws of space and time are more comfortably explored in a Victorian ghost story than in <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2013/feb/14/the-sweeney-box-set">The Sweeney</a>. Having binge-watched series one, I’m living in the hope of an apparition from the future that can confirm there will be a second.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/63025/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>As part of the Diseases of Modern Life team at St Anne's College, Oxford, Melissa Dickson receives funding from the European Research Council under the European Union's Seventh Framework Programme ERC Grant Agreement number 340121.</span></em></p>BBC One’s The Living and the Dead revels in the Victorians’ obsession with the supernatural and the limits of science.Melissa Dickson, Postdoctoral Researcher, University of OxfordLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/571292016-04-20T20:11:58Z2016-04-20T20:11:58Z‘Supp’d full with horrors’: 400 years of Shakespearean supernaturalism<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/118709/original/image-20160414-2617-82oqq8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">From Horace Walpole to Steven King, Shakespeare has inspired centuries of supernatural Gothic terror. </span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Macbeth And Banquo, Théodore Chassériau, 1855. Via Wikimedia Commons</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>The expression “star-crossed lovers,” one of the earliest recorded <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cQKdyaJHglM">“knock, knock” jokes</a> and many other one-liners, metaphors and entirely new words, are some of the gems we associate with Shakespeare. </p>
<p>What is seldom acknowledged, out of Shakespeare’s abundant contributions to our culture, is his influence on the genre of supernatural fear. </p>
<p>Nearly <a href="http://www.shakespeare400.org/">four centuries after his death</a>, the Bard’s impact on supernaturalism and the Gothic genre is equally as significant as his other writings on power, English history, death and love. </p>
<p>Shakespearean ghosts and witches have found a compelling afterlife in a post-Gothic world of film. Macbeth’s weird sisters have been depicted as <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=clG8ha2D26g">schoolgirls, nuns</a>, and <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7RZi36b6SoU">garbage men</a>. Sometimes the ghost of Hamlet Senior is <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IBQucj2hea4">downright terrifying</a>. Sometimes Hamlet <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I81HGVdGzQc">hugs his father’s ghost</a>. Even in Disney’s <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0110357/">G-rated Hamlet</a>, elements of the supernatural – in the form of <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K_OMPrqhA_4">Mufasa’s ghost</a> – are still retained. </p>
<p>When we measure the Bard’s contribution to literary culture, it’s arguably most pronounced in his depictions of the nightmarish and the otherworldly which have inspired so many over the years. </p>
<h2>Night of the living dead</h2>
<p>Macbeth, a play shrouded in superstition, is one of the few Shakespearean plays that earned the moniker “The Scottish Play” to avoid having to use its supposedly-jinxed title. Given the newly-crowned King James’s interest in witchcraft in the early 1600s, (James authored the treatise <a href="https://archive.org/details/daemonologie25929gut">Daemonologie</a> in 1597), Macbeth echoes a cultural fascination with superstition and the occult.</p>
<p>Hamlet begins with a “night of the living dead”: the nocturnal visit of Hamlet Senior provides the narrative thrust which leads Hamlet on to both his tragic death and one of the most overwrought soliloquies in literary history.</p>
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<figcaption><span class="caption">Schwarzenegger’s Hamlet Parody in ‘Last Action Hero’ (1993).</span></figcaption>
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<p>In 1764, at the height of the Enlightenment, Shakespeare’s ghosts and witches were <a href="https://books.google.com.au/books/about/Gothic_Shakespeares.html?id=hzgjzI3-vVoC&redir_esc=y">crucial in the genesis</a> of the first English Gothic novel: Horace Walpole’s, <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/12923.The_Castle_of_Otranto">The Castle of Otranto</a> (1764). </p>
<p>Like Shakespeare’s haunted Danish castle in Hamlet, a ghostly giant and a skeletal apparition populate Walpole’s Otranto. Eschewing the values of reason extolled by the Enlightenment, Walpole’s text challenged the vogue of the eighteenth century realist novel by deploying the machinations of supernatural fear. Notably, Walpole acknowledged the influence of Shakespearean supernaturalism, citing terror as the “principle engine” of his narrative.</p>
<h2>Terror vs horror</h2>
<p>At the turn of the eighteenth century, the efforts of Gothic authors Ann Radcliffe and Matthew Lewis would follow in Walpole’s footsteps. Radcliffe and Lewis drew on Shakespeare in different ways, but both cited quotes from Macbeth as epigraphs to chapters in their novels.</p>
<p>It’s arguably at this juncture in literary history that the differences between supernatural “terror” and “horror” become more clearly defined. Placing an emphasis on terror, Ann Radcliffe pioneered the genre of “explained supernatural”, where terrifying, seemingly supernatural events in her novels were given a realistic, rational explanation. Radcliffe mirrored the suspense and fear of modern thriller films. </p>
<p>On the other side of the coin, Matthew Lewis’s scandalous novel <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/93157.The_Monk">The Monk </a> (1796) eschewed realism, infusing the genre with unrestrained, and horrific, descriptions of the supernatural. Lewis presented readers with nightmarish visions of the Devil, a succubus and individuals haunted by ghosts. The Monk’s explicitness both shocked readers and found praise with critics. Lewis was subsequently forced to censor parts of his novel, including a particularly violent closing scene that shows the antagonist’s brutal death at the hands of the Devil himself. </p>
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<figcaption><span class="caption">Lewis’s novel was recently adapted into a film starring Vincent Cassel.</span></figcaption>
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<p>Lewis is also connected to the other great supernatural books of the era: he knew Lord Byron, John Polidori and the Shelleys. In August 1816, Lewis visited Lord Byron, Percy and Mary Shelley in Geneva – had he arrived several months earlier, he would have been privy to the period of inspiration responsible for the creation of Mary Shelley’s <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18490.Frankenstein">Frankenstein</a> (1818) and Polidori’s <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/472966.The_Vampyre">The Vampyre</a> (1819). </p>
<h2>From supernatural to sci-fi</h2>
<p>The Victorians expanded the Gothic genre beyond supernaturalism: Stevenson’s <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/51496.The_Strange_Case_of_Dr_Jekyll_and_Mr_Hyde">Jekyll and Hyde</a> (1886) and the novels of H.G Wells showed a shift towards science fiction. </p>
<p>This period also gave us Bram Stoker’s <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17245.Dracula">Dracula</a> (1897). Stoker wove elements of Hamlet and Macbeth into one of the most well known and influential Gothic texts of all time. </p>
<p>Moving from the Victorian fin-de siècle to the 20th century, Gothic novelists have paid a consistent intellectual debt to Shakespeare in the genres of terror and horror. </p>
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<figcaption><span class="caption">‘Theatre of Blood’ (1973) stars Vincent Price as a Shakespearean actor.</span></figcaption>
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<p>Pioneer of “cosmic horror”, and the creator of the monstrous Cthulhu, H.P. Lovecraft, cited Shakespeare in his exposition on supernatural horror in literature. Lovecraft’s own ideas on unimaginable horror echoe Shakespeare’s Macduff’s comment on horrors that “neither tongue nor heart can convieve”. </p>
<p>Stephen King’s Jack Torrance from <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/11588.The_Shining">The Shining</a> (1977) is a <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WDpipB4yehk">rampaging Macbeth reincarnated</a>. Even Stephanie Meyer’s star-crossed lovers in <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/41865.Twilight">Twilight</a> (2005) have shades of Shakespeare’s doomed Romeo and Juliet. </p>
<p>In 2016, we celebrate 400 years of the Bard’s impact on our cultural consciousness. While Shakespeare is most often associated with “high culture” and an English literary canon, one tends to forget that he was very much an entertainer. Shakespeare’s knack for tapping into what makes people afraid is arguably one of his greatest achievements.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/57129/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Colin Yeo does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Hamlet begins with a ‘night of the living dead’; Banquo turns into a ghost . The Bard had a supernatural streak and it was crucial to the genesis of Gothic literature.Colin Yeo, PHD Candidate, English and Cultural Studies, The University of Western AustraliaLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/531452016-01-16T19:15:06Z2016-01-16T19:15:06ZKnowledge comes from death’s release: Blackstar recalls David Bowie’s influence on goth<p>David Bowie’s newest album, Blackstar – released shortly before the artist’s death – <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/music/2016/jan/15/david-bowies-blackstar-storms-to-top-of-album-chart">has skyrocketed</a> to the top of the charts. </p>
<p>It’s also become a subject of intense scrutiny by critics and fans: What was the reclusive singer’s state of mind as he approached the final months of his life? Could the album contain any clues? (Some have even speculated that the pop star <a href="http://www.statnews.com/2016/01/11/david-bowie/">delayed his death</a> until after the album’s release.) </p>
<p>No one can say for sure. But when composing the album, Bowie – a master of allusion – clearly had death on his mind. </p>
<p>Specific references to the themes of gender and sexuality that pervade his other work are entirely absent. Instead, Blackstar’s stark depiction of death highlights a longstanding (but often ignored) symbiosis between Bowie’s creative work and the dark, morbid aesthetic of the goth subculture, a movement he inspired in the mid-1970s. </p>
<h2>A series of inevitable deaths</h2>
<p>Death has always been integral to Bowie’s work, and his career has been punctuated by a succession of onstage alter egos, each of whom had to be symbolically “killed off” in order to make way for the next. In the case of one of Bowie’s most outlandish alter ego – the bisexual glam alien Ziggy Stardust – the character’s narrative ended abruptly with his “Rock ’n’ Roll Suicide.”</p>
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<span class="caption">David Bowie’s Deitrich/Garbo character.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://c1.staticflickr.com/3/2454/4078970582_e96163d5bc_b.jpg">Ian Alexander Martin/flickr</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/">CC BY-NC-ND</a></span>
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<p>Plagued by a variety of different troubles, other Bowie protagonists vanished with less fanfare. But their deaths seemed just as inevitable. Bowie’s gender-confused Deitrich/Garbo character – pictured on the cover of Hunky Dory (1971) – <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oP2SS8ggLtU">finds comfort</a> in the belief that “knowledge comes with death’s release.”</p>
<p>Meanwhile, the schizophrenic Aladdin Sane (purportedly modeled on Bowie’s brother) seems to drown in his own depression, wondering whether he’ll ever be loved. In 1976, the cocaine-addled Thin White Duke seems destined, like Bowie’s fictional junkie, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pXSGocWifAg">Major Tom</a> (1969), to lose his grip on reality and float, untethered, into outer space. </p>
<h2>A unique subculture emerges</h2>
<p>Around this time, the term “goth” was becoming more and more widespread.</p>
<p>The word was initially coined in 1967 by rock critic John Stickney to describe Jim Morrison’s brooding personality. Later, it would be freely applied to bands that eluded characterization (most famously The Velvet Underground). </p>
<p>By the late 1970s, the term was used more broadly to describe a subculture that identified itself with “gothic” themes drawn from 19th-century horror literature. Visually, early “goths” – male and female – conveyed “horror” with black clothing, exaggerated black makeup, and piercings. Musically, the genre depicts isolation and despair with hypnotic rhythms, echos, and flanging guitar effects that sounded cold and brittle. An example from the period is Bauhaus’ “Bela Lugosi’s Dead” (1979), whose lyrical references to vampirism and the occult are set to a bleak repetitive musical text.</p>
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<figcaption><span class="caption">Bauhaus’ Bela Lugosi’s Dead.</span></figcaption>
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<p>The deaths of each of these early Bowie characters – and the problems that they faced in their fictional lives – provided thematic fodder for the goth bands that followed. Siouxsie and the Banshees, The Cure, Joy Division, and Bauhaus all focused their attention on the dark recesses of the human psyche. Like Bowie’s creations, their songs similarly confronted topics like death, human suffering and isolation.</p>
<p>And like their Bowie precursors, early goth characters – like Siouxsie, Robert Smith and Dave Vanian – were theatrical, dramatic and challenged conventional ideas about gender and sexuality. </p>
<p>Meanwhile, the specter of death remained ever-present – on the surface in goth, and always in the background for Bowie as he moved from one alter ego to the next. </p>
<h2>In Blackstar, a pop legend confronts death</h2>
<p>The dark and disturbing imagery of Blackstar’s videos clearly draw upon gothic influences like horror and the supernatural.</p>
<p>The album title derives from a term used to describe a radial scar pattern found in some patients with breast cancer. Meanwhile, the lyrics identify the singer as “the Blackstar,” who instructs his listeners to “look up here, I’m in heaven.” </p>
<p>In “Lazarus,” we watch a blindfolded man who, like Lazarus, attempts to rise up from his deathbed. In “Blackstar,” we witness a woman stumble upon the jewel-encrusted skull of a dead astronaut under the gloom of a solar eclipse. </p>
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<figcaption><span class="caption">The music video for Blackstar’s title track.</span></figcaption>
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<p>Meanwhile, in Bowie’s final videos, the characters of “the priest” and “the patient” are obvious allusions to death. In his final appearance on the music video, Bowie shepherds the patient “Lazarus” into the dark recesses of death’s closet. Combine this with Bowie’s sickly pallor and shocking physical deterioration in both videos, and it’s impossible to miss the point.</p>
<p>While Blackstar certainly recalls a genre that Bowie helped to nurture over 40 years ago, both goth and Bowie have changed in the intervening decades. Today, goth retains its many of its original visual qualities. But these have been adopted by newer musical genres like post-punk, metal, industrial and shock rock, dark ambient, and trip-hop.</p>
<p>Nearing the age of 70 and faced with the prospect of his own death, Bowie could no longer convincingly present himself as the sexually ambiguous alien being that inspired goth’s style. And why would he? Instead, he chose to embrace the “ordinary mortal” as his final persona, while imagining his own death through a vocabulary of visual signifiers drawn from the goth subculture. </p>
<p>This is Bowie stripped bare, and our identification with his mortality is what makes this final work both compelling and upsetting. </p>
<p>The day after his death, Bowie’s longtime collaborator and producer, Tony Visconti, <a href="https://www.facebook.com/tony.visconti1/posts/10208522003550232?pnref=story">declared on Facebook</a> that “his death was no different from his life – a work of Art.”</p>
<p>Unfortunately, this time there won’t be any reinvention.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/53145/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Karen Fournier does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>The dark, disturbing imagery of Bowie’s final album recalls how the artist inspired the goth movement of the 1970s and 1980s.Karen Fournier, Associate Professor of Music Theory, University of MichiganLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/493962015-10-20T05:18:10Z2015-10-20T05:18:10ZCrimson Peak – a gothic romance that takes us back to the feminine early days of horror<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/98879/original/image-20151019-23275-1mkvo33.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Universal</span></span></figcaption></figure><p><em>This article contains spoilers.</em></p>
<p>Horror comes in many guises. Psychological, violent, gothic, sure. But rarely – in contemporary culture – romantic. Romance (in the modern sense of the word) doesn’t tend to crop up in much modern horror, or in gothic garb – and when it does, it is frequently looked down on, and labelled a perversion. </p>
<p>Take Twilight. Both the books and their (female) readers were <a href="http://www.lancaster.ac.uk/news/blogs/catherine-spooner/gove-and-the-gothic-why-are-the-tories-so-troubled-by-twilight/">derided</a> as lacking credibility. Although an inheritor of the tradition of the gothic dating back to the 18th century, it faced criticism in a contemporary culture for whom the word “romance” has come to signify cliché and naivety, lacking artistic credibility. Twilight was sidelined, <a href="http://blogs.bcu.ac.uk/views/2013/07/04/why-harry-potter-is-gothic-and-twilight-isnt/">considered unauthentically gothic</a> in attempt to bolster the genre’s reputation. </p>
<p>The same is true of Guillermo del Toro’s keenly anticipated film, Crimson Peak. Indeed, Forbes’ review suggests that it <a href="http://www.forbes.com/sites/scottmendelson/2015/10/14/review-crimson-peak-is-so-disappointing-its-scary/">is little better than Twilight</a>, so disappointed are they with the film’s lack of horror. What Crimson Peak reminds us, though, is that gothic romance is the originator of modern horror: gothic and romance are inextricably related.</p>
<p>Crimson Peak is set at the turn of the 20th century and follows the fate of the American middle-class Edith (Mia Wasikowska) as she is seduced by the English baronet, Thomas Sharpe (Tom Hiddleston) and travels with him to his crumbling Cumberland ancestral home, Allerdale Hall. As she explores the gothic mansion, which is slowly sinking into the oozing red clay of the family’s now defunct mines, Edith realises that the Sharpe family hide a host of unsavoury secrets. Ghosts, unburied bodies and secret wax recordings by the house’s former residents reveal the Sharpe family to be morally corrupt and psychologically unstable. Trapped by a raging winter storm, Edith searches desperately for an escape.</p>
<p>This might sound horrific, but critics remain divided as to the legitimacy of the film as a piece of gothic horror. <a href="http://www.digitalspy.co.uk/movies/review/a673622/crimson-peak-review-jessica-chastain-shines-in-guillermo-del-toros-disappointing-gothic-romance.html#%7EpruSpV7lxeKA5F">For Digital Spy</a>, it is the fact that the film is so overtly a romance – and not horror – that renders it a failure. What these reviews reveal is a split in our cultural consciousness between forms of fiction deemed masculine (horror), and those deemed feminine (romance). But Crimson Peak divides critics precisely because it presents an ambiguous mixture of both: it refuses to entirely disavow the feminine in favour of the masculine. And this is its triumph.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/98867/original/image-20151019-23254-1r38bwt.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/98867/original/image-20151019-23254-1r38bwt.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=323&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/98867/original/image-20151019-23254-1r38bwt.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=323&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/98867/original/image-20151019-23254-1r38bwt.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=323&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/98867/original/image-20151019-23254-1r38bwt.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=405&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/98867/original/image-20151019-23254-1r38bwt.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=405&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/98867/original/image-20151019-23254-1r38bwt.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=405&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Crumbling Cumberland castle.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Universal</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>The birth of horror</h2>
<p>The genre of gothic romance held court between 1760 and 1830. Walpole initiated the trend with <a href="http://www.bl.uk/learning/timeline/item126941.html">The Castle of Otranto</a> in 1764, a self-styled “Gothic Romance” featuring many of the tropes we see in Crimson Peak. Following the publication of Walpole’s Otranto, stories of virtuous heroines incarcerated in the crumbling ruins of medieval Europe, pursued by degenerate aristocrats hiding gruesome terrible family secrets, were eagerly consumed by a bourgeois English reading public. </p>
<p>Del Toro adapts this familiar format replacing “savage” medieval Europe with “savage” <em>fin de siècle</em> England. The decaying wilderness of Cumberland provides an apt backdrop for a tale of child abuse, incest and murder. This is contrasted with Edith’s bustling modern hometown of Buffalo, New York.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/98868/original/image-20151019-23254-1x14lle.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/98868/original/image-20151019-23254-1x14lle.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=325&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/98868/original/image-20151019-23254-1x14lle.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=325&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/98868/original/image-20151019-23254-1x14lle.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=325&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/98868/original/image-20151019-23254-1x14lle.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=408&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/98868/original/image-20151019-23254-1x14lle.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=408&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/98868/original/image-20151019-23254-1x14lle.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=408&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Edith.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Universal</span></span>
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</figure>
<p>In 18th century gothic it is possible to identify female tropes (entrapment and incarceration) alongside male ones (exile and isolation) in the same works. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein – a classic work of masculine gothic focusing on the transgressions of the anti-hero – is also intimately concerned with the feminine in its exploration of motherhood and familial relationships. </p>
<p>Crimson Peak’s portrayal of the sinister Sharpe family contains the tropes of monstrosity and transgression that are associated with the “masculine” gothic. But Crimson Peak also explores what Kate Ferguson Ellis dubs the “<a href="http://www.press.uillinois.edu/books/catalog/35xte5dm9780252060489.html">female gothic</a>”; a story concerned with the way female subjects are incarcerated and confined by the repressive ideologies and structures of patriarchal society. The horror of Crimson Peak lies as much in its exploration of the characters’ emotions, in its “feminine” concerns, as in its depiction of gruesome violence and sexual transgression.</p>
<h2>Female horror</h2>
<p>Initially, Crimson Peak is a little squeamish about the idea of romance. Edith writes ghost stories but does not want to be seen as a women’s writer and baulks at the idea of inserting a romance plot into her manuscript. She also rejects the idea of romance for herself, reminding friends that Jane Austen died a spinster and Shelley a widow. </p>
<p>Some critics have found that the subsequent romance between Edith and Thomas <a href="http://www.gamesradar.com/crimson-peak-review/">somewhat stilted</a>, but this is the point. The unsatisfying interactions between Thomas and Edith reveal the film’s feminine concerns: Edith’s arrival at the rotting Allerdale Hall brings with it a sickening sense of regret and dismay as she realises that not only is she trapped in the crumbling castle, but that she has fatally misjudged her lover’s intentions and feelings. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/98863/original/image-20151019-23270-19i45k0.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/98863/original/image-20151019-23270-19i45k0.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/98863/original/image-20151019-23270-19i45k0.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/98863/original/image-20151019-23270-19i45k0.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/98863/original/image-20151019-23270-19i45k0.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=501&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/98863/original/image-20151019-23270-19i45k0.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=501&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/98863/original/image-20151019-23270-19i45k0.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=501&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Thomas and Edith.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Universal</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>It is Thomas’s sister Lucille who most entangles the masculine with the feminine. Transgressive and violent, Lucille is the film’s anti-hero, taking the masculine role from her brother once the action moves to Cumberland. Yet she is also incarcerated, confined by her domestic role as daughter and sister, consumed by bitter disappointment and regret. Lucille’s homicidal madness is a necessary gothic trope, as well as a nod to Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca (1938). But it is also a result of the particular psychological demands made on women in the patriarchal family. We find out that both Sharpe children were neglected and abused by their parents: Lucille had to care for Thomas and sit by her mother’s bedside, nursing her abuser back to health.</p>
<p>One <a href="http://www.bustle.com/articles/117428-the-crimson-peak-final-fight-scene-is-unflinchingly-feminist-exactly-we-need-in-mainstream-film">review</a> of the film applauds its “feminist” climax, which sees Edith and Lucille locked in physical battle, the male characters nowhere to be seen. The decisive action of the plucky heroine is laudable indeed, but it accompanies a feminine tragedy. Though our plucky heroine will escape, her antagonist cannot. The most horrifying and haunting image of the film is that of Lucille – now a ghost – inescapably incarcerated in the shadow of her mother’s portrait, while Edith escapes through the castle’s gates.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/98865/original/image-20151019-23226-j146t2.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/98865/original/image-20151019-23226-j146t2.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=356&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/98865/original/image-20151019-23226-j146t2.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=356&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/98865/original/image-20151019-23226-j146t2.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=356&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/98865/original/image-20151019-23226-j146t2.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=447&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/98865/original/image-20151019-23226-j146t2.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=447&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/98865/original/image-20151019-23226-j146t2.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=447&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Lucille.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Universal</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Crimson Peak is a gothic romance intimately concerned with the emotional burden of familial and romantic relationships – and with the psychological cost that care demands take on women. It is also a film that is interested in sexual transgression, monstrosity and excess. Del Toro’s entangling of horror with romance refuses to privilege one form over the other. Subsequently, the film’s horror is located both in the grotesque ghosts and brutal violence <em>and</em> in the claustrophobia its feminine emotional register produces. And as such, it takes horror back to its beginning.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/49396/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Chloe Germaine Buckley does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Crimson Peak reminds us that gothic romance is the originator of modern horror: gothic and romance are inextricably related.Chloe Germaine Buckley, Associate Lecturer in Literature, Lancaster UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/468272015-09-03T05:36:45Z2015-09-03T05:36:45ZGoths just wanna have fun – why there’s a problem with the depressed stereotype<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/93532/original/image-20150901-13422-1unczo2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Laugh, it's Tim Minchin. </span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/129453709@N03/15717595908/in/photolist-ce7RzY-bWKueV-ce7Rvd-ce7S55-btAiTb-btAjaQ-btAivE-btAkV9-btAmcj-752vU3-bGv9UM-buq1tQ-btAmAh-guM6su-aswGi7-9DLtTn-pMYby7-eDzmnv-c6E4id-c6E2zj-c6DZZE-c6E4zs-c6E2Vf-c6DZsC-c6E3Q1-c6E3tY-c6E1sG-9sT692-pWUMEU-q5c1rz-phHSzD-pN2hz1-aswGcY-9nJqkj-8iLap4-6ovGAZ-c6DYe3-6s13Qk-9DPmg5-9DPmhY-9DLupr-r3Rizu-btejEy-bGa2si-bG9aGa-btekoq-bG99Dr-bG9bqp-bG99mc-76oB8u">Katy Walsh</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">CC BY</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Goths are more likely to be depressed, we’re told in a recent study <a href="http://bit.ly/1UhreLS">that was published in The Lancet Psychiatry</a>. You’d be forgiven for a lack of surprise – the report seems to confirm a self-evident truth that popular culture has taken for granted. </p>
<p>The image of the Goth teenager as a depressed loner is a pervasive one. But it is not one that Goths tend to choose for themselves. Goth subculture produces images of itself that are variously glamorous, romantic, whimsical, melodramatic, erotic, mundane – and above all humorous. </p>
<h2>Why ‘Goths’?</h2>
<p>Lucy Bowes and fellow authors suggest in the study that those subjects who self-identified as Goths at age 15 were, at age 18, three times more likely to be diagnosed with clinical depression and five times more likely to report self-harm in comparison with other teenagers. The authors are careful to state that their research cannot be used to identify a causal relationship between self-identifying as a Goth and becoming depressed or self-harming – rather they detect a correlation. </p>
<p>While they consider that “peer contagion” cannot be ruled out, they also point out that the Goth community, renowned for its tolerance of difference, may provide a protective function for individuals already predisposed to mental illness. </p>
<p>The report defines Goth as “rebelling against the norm (in clothing or ideas, for example), or in attempting not to conform to social ideals”. Bowes qualifies this <a href="http://www.thelancet.com/pb/assets/raw/Lancet/stories/audio/lanpsy/2015/lanpsy_150828.mp3">in a podcast</a> by explaining that Goth is a fluid term that changes over time, and given that the study took place over several years, her team did not wish to pin it to a particular music or clothing style. For the purposes of the study, Goth was primarily constructed as being “on the periphery”.</p>
<p>While Bowes’s team’s understanding of the fluidity and flexibility of sub-cultural identification is exemplary, it does raise a question about whether “Goth” is an appropriate term at all. Rebelling against the norm in clothing or ideas is a feature of any number of youth sub-cultures, as is thinking of oneself as an outsider. “Goth” in Bowes’s study is being used as a generalised marker of difference, and its specificity is diminished.</p>
<h2>Goth stereotypes</h2>
<p>Despite its nuance, the report confirms a stereotype of Goths as depressed loners that, when taken out of context, can become pernicious or harmful. While the authors encourage care for young people’s mental health, media presentations of this stereotype often encourage prejudice that may result in bullying or violence. In an extreme case, it even caused the erroneous identification of the Columbine school shooters as Goths in 1999.</p>
<p>Although there was scant evidence linking the killers with the Goth scene, an off-the-cuff comment reported on ABC News’s 20/20 show was seized on by the global media and spiralled into a world-wide moral panic about Goth’s dangerous influence on ordinary teenagers. While Goths were cast as the villains in the high school bullying narrative, they are <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/uk/2008/aug/03/ukcrime.sophielancaster">more typically the victims</a>. </p>
<p>As a result, many Goths post-Columbine took definition of their sub-culture into their hands, writing accounts of being a Goth that emphasised its positive qualities, such as creativity, self-expression, tolerance and community. This process of <a href="http://www.sophielancasterfoundation.com/">answering back to the mainstream media</a> found fresh impetus following the murder of self-identified Goth Sophie Lancaster in 2007. In the wake of persecution, Goths sought to defend their lifestyle choices and to explain themselves to a mainstream media that they had previously shunned.</p>
<h2>Goth humour</h2>
<p>In particular, accounts of Goths by Goths themselves often stress how much fun it is to be one. Dressing up, dancing, hanging out with like-minded friends – Goths enjoy similar leisure activities to young (and not-so-young) people the world over. As Liisa Ladouceur, author of <a href="http://www.ecwpress.com/books/encyclopedia-gothica">Encyclopaedia Gothica</a>, suggests: “If you’ve ever thought Goths take themselves too seriously, you’ve never watched them make up names for their silly dance moves or craft Goth-specific chat-up lines”. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/93533/original/image-20150901-13425-1p5aopn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/93533/original/image-20150901-13425-1p5aopn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=398&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/93533/original/image-20150901-13425-1p5aopn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=398&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/93533/original/image-20150901-13425-1p5aopn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=398&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/93533/original/image-20150901-13425-1p5aopn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=501&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/93533/original/image-20150901-13425-1p5aopn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=501&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/93533/original/image-20150901-13425-1p5aopn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=501&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<span class="caption">Whitby Goth weekenders take it to the streets.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/ledgard/8685771993/in/photolist-eewRpx-JxDxR-PrJzq-qRL86-9tHhrr-eeCyyy-eewTdz-dqzqBz-9tLfBN-9trrpt-eeTw5J-dqj4qN-dqzoLc-dqj55W-eewQW2-eeTuGs-eeMNtB-4HWz5J-eeTwxC-eeTtcS-PrJzu-4J7KRC-4HXneY-qVHKb-4HWAPN-9tHdsX-eeMKzV-eeCBcL-7W8wrt-dqzsg2-aCkjSv-9tH9Ei-dqzp7n-9uiPGe-dqiUsV-eeCBRJ-dqj46B-dqiYuH-eeMLUe-dqjaQ7-dqzvfH-eeCzLA-dqj9vq-dqiXHH-7W8vAZ-eeTwNA-aCkks6-dqj3E5-qRRhj-4HSj8p">Bryan Ledgard</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">CC BY</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Similarly, self-appointed Goth agony aunt Jillian Venters states in her popular blog, <a href="http://gothic-charm-school.com/charm/?page_id=58">Gothic Charm School</a>: “Witty, sarcastic, and possibly a touch cynical, yes. Mean-spirited, sullen, and rude, no.”</p>
<p>Recent cultural representations of Goth embrace comedy and laughter. The “perky Goth” has become a recognisable archetype, most famously embodied in the character of Death, a cheerful Goth girl, in <a href="http://www.neilgaiman.com/Cool_Stuff/Essays/Essays_About_Neil/The_Sandman_Summary">Neil Gaiman’s renowned comic The Sandman</a>. Film director Tim Burton’s brand of Gothic whimsy has become synonymous with the sub-culture. Goth shapes the material and personae of stand-up comedians such as Bethany Black, Tim Minchin and Andrew O’Neill (O’Neill finding endless comedy in the fine distinction between Goth and his self-identification as metalhead) and is burlesqued by comic musician Voltaire. </p>
<p>Noel Fielding collaborates with Russell Brand as the “Goth Detectives” and in a memorable episode of Fielding’s TV comedy The Mighty Boosh, its heroes are saved by Goth Juice: “The most powerful hairspray known to man. Made from the tears of Robert Smith”.</p>
<p>These cultural representations, which deliberately and sympathetically engage with a Goth audience, are important, as they show the kind of stories Goths like to tell, or hear, about themselves. The laughter that they provoke is also dependent on community – on a shared knowledge that can be recognised and parodied. As such they offer an alternative viewpoint on being a Goth, one that echoes the celebratory and inclusive qualities of the sub-culture itself.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/46827/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Catherine Spooner has previously received funding from the Arts and Humanities Research Council towards research on this project.</span></em></p>Goth teenagers are just like other teenagers the world over – they get depressed, they laugh, they’re creative – so why do we pigeonhole?Catherine Spooner, Reader in Literature and Culture, Lancaster UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/417592015-05-24T20:12:23Z2015-05-24T20:12:23ZBeyond Sorry: colonial oppression on Australian stages<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/82322/original/image-20150520-30498-19d031e.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Andrew Bovell's adaptation of Kate Grenville's The Secret River is a key example of post-Apology theatre.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">AAP Image/Heidrun Löhr</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Theatrical journeys into Australia’s colonial history have often been rather grim affairs. Over the last 30 years or so, some of country’s most eminent playwrights – Louis Nowra, Andrew Bovell, Stephen Sewell, and Katherine Thomson among others – have created works in which the physical and psychological frontiers of settlement resemble grisly warzones of colonial oppression. So where are we now, in terms of our non-Indigenous drama?</p>
<p>It has been nearly seven years since Kevin Rudd <a href="http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2008/02/13/1202760379056.html">delivered his apology</a> to Indigenous Australians in 2008. It was a key moment in Australian postcolonial relations, and before it many settler descendent Australians expressed intense feelings of shame and remorse. As a result, the apology came to be framed as a kind of catharsis, as if some form of forgiveness might be bestowed on non-Indigenous people who felt compelled to say “sorry”.</p>
<p>The current political climate around Indigenous affairs appears to directly contradict that lost desire for exculpation that so animated non-Indigenous Australians to ask for forgiveness less than a decade ago.</p>
<p>Against a hostile backdrop of regular protest marches, the Abbott government’s plans to <a href="https://theconversation.com/abbott-is-quietly-failing-on-his-pm-for-aboriginal-affairs-promise-26948">cut funding</a> to remote communities, the half-billion dollar cuts to Indigenous services, the still decade-wide gap in life expectancy and soaring Indigenous incarceration rates, that utopian dream of a “united nation” now appears distant. </p>
<p>In 2015 the question lingers: where has our sympathy and recognition gone? </p>
<p>In considering that question from a non-Indigenous perspective, urban studies scholar Jane M. Jacobs has <a href="http://www.acme-journal.org/vol9/Jacobs10.pdf">argued</a> that:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>the drive to create an “on record” apology is proof of a settler subject actively transforming him or herself from “colonialist” into that fantasised subject of the postcolonial nation. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>Surveying the contemporary political scene, what exactly constitutes this “fantasised” non-Indigenous identity remains woefully unclear and is still the subject of much progressive and conservative debate. </p>
<p>Jacobs goes on to suggest that in hindsight the motivation behind the Apology might not have been exclusively about healing the misery of The Stolen Generation, but rather the desire of those settler Australians to seek “absolution for past sins”.</p>
<p>For contemporary non-Indigenous Australians, this lingering “bad faith” occupies a strange place in our national psyche – it exists somewhere between a desperately desired concept of forgiveness and the dire political reality of current Indigenous policy. This complex problem has been the subject of several recent Australian plays that explore the darker recesses of the non-Indigenous ego. </p>
<h2>Colonialism onstage</h2>
<p>The use of on-stage tropes to represent colonial oppression has been written about extensively by many scholars in my field of Theatre Studies. The over-arching theme is that non-Indigenous playwrights appear consumed by the desire to exhume, revise, critique or, perhaps, correct a national narrative in which colonial violence, massacre and dispossession has remained concealed in official accounts of history. </p>
<p>Together their works can be read as a response to what <a href="http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/stanner-william-edward-bill-15541">WEH Stanner</a> in 1968 infamously called “The Great Australian Silence”. To counter this forgetting, many non-indigenous Australians took up the mantle of responsibility and supported the move towards a formalised Reconciliation program way back in 1991. </p>
<p>In particular, many non-Indigenous Australian playwrights throughout the 1980s, 90s and early 00s made concerted efforts to challenge the traditional narratives.</p>
<p>If one were to reduce this theme to a single, exemplifying theatrical gesture, a prime candidate would be the closing moments of Andrew Bovell’s 2001 Gothic melodrama <a href="https://australianplays.org/script/CP-246">Holy Day</a>. </p>
<p>A young Indigenous woman delivers a soliloquy describing the massacre of an Aboriginal family group on the colonial frontier. She reaches the final, graphic details before uttering the haunting proclamation that “[t]his is our history”. It read then, and still does, as a haunting accusation. It becomes more visceral when we learn our speaker has her tongue brutally excised to ensure she is forever silent.</p>
<p>Holy Day opened at the height of the so-called “History Wars” and the play wore its pejorative black armband with political and artistic defiance. But that was nearly 15 years ago. A lot has happened since.</p>
<p>More recently Bovell has eerily repeated those terrible, closing minutes of Holy Day in his critically acclaimed 2013 adaptation of Kate Grenville’s <a href="https://australianplays.org/script/CP-2787">The Secret River</a>. The play similarly concludes with the horrific details of a massacre. </p>
<p>Although the two plays are similar, the most glaring difference between these two nightmarish visions of settlement is a strange, entangled sense of “knowing”. </p>
<p>A contemporary audience already knows how the story ends. What played as a stark revelation in 2001 is re-played as a precise, vile reminder in 2013. The frontier of Holy Day is an imagined place – a distinct yet open allegory for all those un-memorialised colonial battlefields that historian Henry Reynolds wrote about in his 2013 study, <a href="https://www.newsouthbooks.com.au/books/frontier-wars-and-history-wars/">The Forgotten War</a>. </p>
<p>The Secret River locates its violence exactly – on “the Hawkesbury River between September 1813 and April 1814”. The massacre is a known piece of knowledge that, in its explicitness, seems to declare that ignorance is now wilful disavowal. For Bovell, there is no silence this time. Instead, the final image is of the white protagonist – William Thornhill – building his picket fence, demarcating his piece of earth on what is now unmistakably stolen land.</p>
<p>Both Holy Day and The Secret River can be classified as Australian Gothic theatre. Although the genre is more traditionally associated with literature and film, the last half-decade has seen more and more playwrights return to the genre’s moribund sheen and language of ghosts. </p>
<p>So much so that theatre scholar and playwright Stephen Carleton is <a href="http://search.informit.com.au/documentSummary;dn=201216065;res=IELAPA">convinced</a> the Australian theatre is currently experiencing a “boom” in Gothic playwriting.</p>
<h2>Guilt and the Gothic</h2>
<p>As the Apology languishes in near-history, a body of new Gothic plays has explored the darker recesses of the non-Indigenous psyche. Although very different in form, content and aesthetic, they are all willing to explore White Australia’s guilt.</p>
<p>Angela Betzien has found an audience across the country with her play <a href="https://australianplays.org/script/PL-57">The Dark Room</a> (2009). It is a nightmarish commentary on the Northern Territory Intervention into remote communities. Similarly, there has been critical acclaim for fringe efforts such as Jackie Smith’s melancholic vision of settler womanhood and patriarchy in <a href="https://australianplays.org/script/ASC-1469">The Flood </a>(2012). </p>
<p>Andrew McGahan and Shaun Charles’ adaptation of <a href="https://australianplays.org/script/PL-51">The White Earth</a> (2009) reinvents the traditional Gothic melodrama in order to challenge notions of non-Indigenous “belonging” and sacredness.</p>
<p>This trend looks backwards too with the Malthouse Theatre’s new take on two Australian Gothic classics – Stephen Sewell’s <a href="http://www.filmsinspace.com/portfolio/hate-malthouse-theatre/">Hate</a> (2012) and Matthew Lutton’s reimagining of Patrick White’s <a href="http://malthousetheatre.com.au/whats-on/night-on-bald-mountain">Night on Bald Mountain</a> (2014). These productions are but a few examples of the mounting body of evidence that supports Carleton’s claim that the Gothic has returned as a force in Australian theatre.</p>
<p>The Gothic in these plays offers no solutions to our anxiety surrounding home and belonging. Nor does it have an obligation to. Each of these plays serve as a haunting reminder to their diverse core audiences that our efforts to reconcile Australia’s dark history may not be as settled as we wished for back in 2008. They reiterate that saying sorry was not enough.</p>
<p>Instead, we are painfully reminded that an imagined absolution, though comforting, can be as concealing as apathy, racism and ignorance. Each playwright mentioned here dramatises these complicated anxieties in the most aggressive and confronting theatrical language at their disposal – the Gothic.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/41759/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Andrew Harmsen does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>It’s been seven years since Kevin Rudd delivered his apology to Indigenous Australians. On Australia’s stages dramatists continue to explore the ramifications of that apology and colonial history.Andrew Harmsen, PhD candidate, The University of MelbourneLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/385442015-03-11T06:24:08Z2015-03-11T06:24:08ZThe gothic vision at the heart of Alexander McQueen’s savage beauty<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/74305/original/image-20150310-13567-11ax50f.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Alexander McQueen, It's Only a Game, S/S 2005.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">firstVIEW</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>London is about to experience an Alexander McQueen extravaganza. A <a href="http://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-britain/exhibition/nick-waplingtonalexander-mcqueen-working-process">show at the Tate Britain</a> has just opened featuring Nick Waplington’s photographs of McQueen’s work in the run-up to his final autumn/winter collection in 2009.</p>
<p>But all the talk is about the long awaited <a href="http://www.vam.ac.uk/content/exhibitions/exhibition-alexander-mcqueen-savage-beauty/">Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty</a>, which opens at the Victoria and Albert Museum on March 14. This is an expanded and re-curated version of the exhibition first shown at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, where it attracted more than <a href="http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2012-01-12/moma-attendance-falls-met-museum-rises-driven-by-blockbusters">660,000 visitors</a> in three months and devotees reportedly queued for up to <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/mar/07/fierce-feathered-fragile-alexander-mcqueen-life">five hours</a> to get in. Its runaway success looks to be repeated in London, where the exhibition has already been extended until August to cope with demand.</p>
<p>So what is the reason for McQueen’s phenomenal popularity? Commentators regularly cite the tragic lure of his early death, his role as agent provocateur of the fashion world, and of course the beauty, originality and technical skill of his creations. But one element of his allure is mentioned much less frequently: the overtly gothic quality of much of his work. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/74329/original/image-20150310-13564-1jy7fpa.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/74329/original/image-20150310-13564-1jy7fpa.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/74329/original/image-20150310-13564-1jy7fpa.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=900&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/74329/original/image-20150310-13564-1jy7fpa.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=900&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/74329/original/image-20150310-13564-1jy7fpa.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=900&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/74329/original/image-20150310-13564-1jy7fpa.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1132&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/74329/original/image-20150310-13564-1jy7fpa.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1132&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/74329/original/image-20150310-13564-1jy7fpa.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1132&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Duck feather dress, Alexander McQueen, The Horn of Plenty, A/W 2009-10.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">firstVIEW</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Gothic, not goth</h2>
<p>The term “gothic” is an ambivalent one in the fashion press. Although regularly invoked by fashion editors, its association with “goth”, a youth subculture that emerged in early 1980s Britain and is often derided as hackneyed and gauche by outsiders, makes it <em>déclassé</em> for many designers. But this is a misrepresentation of both goth itself, a complex and evolving subculture, and the broader term gothic that informs it. Gothic refers to a rich and multivalent cultural tradition that is both distinctively British and distinctively of the moment.</p>
<p>The gothic has been one of the UK’s greatest cultural exports, from the novels of the 18th and 19th centuries that defined the genre to the subcultural music and style that continues to throw a long shadow over global youth culture. But after a long period in which the cultural establishment seemed slightly embarrassed about the nation’s gothic leanings, it appears it is finally ready to embrace them. </p>
<p>That such a change in sensibility has occurred can be seen from a series of major events at big public institutions. The British Film Institute’s <a href="http://www.bfi.org.uk/news-opinion/news-bfi/announcements/bfi-unveils-gothic-dark-heart-film">Gothic: The Dark Heart of Film</a>, a six-month season of events and screenings held in 2013-14, was their most ambitious season to date. The British Library’s <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2014/oct/03/terror-and-wonder-the-gothic-imagination-british-library">Terror and Wonder: the Gothic Imagination</a> followed shortly afterwards in October 2014, and was likewise the <a href="http://www.bl.uk/press-releases/2014/october/terror-and-wonder-the-uks-largest-exhibition-of-gothic-literature-opens-at-the-british-library">biggest event</a> of its kind. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/74327/original/image-20150310-13539-uvn4t4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/74327/original/image-20150310-13539-uvn4t4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/74327/original/image-20150310-13539-uvn4t4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=908&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/74327/original/image-20150310-13539-uvn4t4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=908&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/74327/original/image-20150310-13539-uvn4t4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=908&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/74327/original/image-20150310-13539-uvn4t4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1141&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/74327/original/image-20150310-13539-uvn4t4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1141&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/74327/original/image-20150310-13539-uvn4t4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1141&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Dress of dyed ostrich feathers and hand painted microscopic slides, Alexander McQueen, Voss, S/S 2001.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">REX</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>From vampires to sportswear</h2>
<p>And it’s not just the museums. The gothic is everywhere in popular media too. From Twilight to American Horror Story, Hannibal to <a href="http://www.gothic.stir.ac.uk/blog/monstrous-obsessions-lady-gaga-horror-and-subversive-desire/">Lady Gaga</a> (who wears ensembles from McQueen’s Plato’s Atlantis in the video for <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qrO4YZeyl0I">Bad Romance</a>), gothic is becoming one of the dominant modes of our time. Since the later 1990s, it has been an almost permanent fixture on the catwalk. It is reinvented for each new season, its latest iteration “<a href="http://www.theguardian.com/fashion/fashion-blog/2014/oct/22/goth-streetwear-monochrome-and-sportswear-what-is-health-goth">health goth</a>”: a trend for darkly inclined sportswear that inspired Alexander Wang’s <a href="http://www.popsugar.co.uk/fashion/Alexander-Wang-HM-Collaboration-2014-34571864#photo-35939092">2014 collection for H&M</a>, among others. </p>
<p>Health goth is derived directly from street style, the juxtaposition of two styles that seem incompatible, fused into something new. McQueen’s use of gothic is more multifaceted – it draws on a broad vocabulary from literary, cinematic, art and fashion history to pose important questions about our relationships with our bodies, about desire, about mortality. </p>
<p>McQueen’s work speaks to our current love of the gothic like that of no other designer. Virtually all his work, from his MA graduation show, <a href="http://blog.metmuseum.org/alexandermcqueen/coat-jack-the-ripper/">Jack the Ripper Stalks His Victims</a> (1992), to his <a href="http://www.instyle.co.uk/fashion/news/alexander-mcqueen-aw-2010-the-final-show">final unfinished collection</a> (autumn/winter 2010), inspired by medieval ecclesiastical painting, engages with the gothic on one level or another. </p>
<h2>Obsessed with the past</h2>
<p>And the most overtly gothic is very gothic indeed. <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Drea7Dgi-h8">The Hunger</a> (spring/summer 1996) was named after the <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0085701/">cult vampire film</a> starring Catherine Deneuve and David Bowie and featured a transparent, moulded plastic corset encasing a layer of worms. And then <a href="http://bohemenoir.blogspot.co.uk/2011/12/retrospective-givenchy-haute-couture.html">Eclect Dissect</a>, his autumn/winter 1997 show for Givenchy, was themed around a fictitious Victorian surgeon who collected women, animals and clothes from around the world and cut up and reassembled them. <a href="http://www.alexandermcqueen.com/experience/en/alexandermcqueen/archive/?years=2002&season=autumnwinter#id_article=166">Supercalifragilistic</a> (autumn/winter 2002), his tribute to Tim Burton, mixed up Batman with Grimm’s fairy tales and Marie Antoinette, and was staged in the prison where the French queen awaited the guillotine.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/74324/original/image-20150310-13573-1ojjqtp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/74324/original/image-20150310-13573-1ojjqtp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/74324/original/image-20150310-13573-1ojjqtp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=904&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/74324/original/image-20150310-13573-1ojjqtp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=904&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/74324/original/image-20150310-13573-1ojjqtp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=904&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/74324/original/image-20150310-13573-1ojjqtp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1136&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/74324/original/image-20150310-13573-1ojjqtp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1136&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/74324/original/image-20150310-13573-1ojjqtp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1136&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Tulle and lace dress with veil and antlers, Alexander McQueen, Widows of Culloden autumn/winter 2006-7.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">firstVIEW</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>But perhaps the most quintessentially gothic quality of McQueen’s work is his fascination with history. Hauntings, revenants, ancestral curses and uncanny returns are the most definitive property of the kind of gothic found in films and books. The past also weighs heavy on the present for McQueen, whether the oppression of Scotland by England in <a href="http://blog.metmuseum.org/alexandermcqueen/dress-highland-rape/">Highland Rape</a> (autumn/winter 1995) and <a href="http://www.alexandermcqueen.com/experience/en/alexandermcqueen/archive/womens-autumnwinter-2006-the-widows-of-culloden/">Widows of Culloden</a> (autumn/winter 2006), or the execution of an ancestor as a witch in <a href="http://www.alexandermcqueen.com/experience/en/alexandermcqueen/archive/womens-autumnwinter-2007-in-memory-of-elizabeth-howe-salem-1692/">In Memory of Elizabeth Howe, Salem, 1692</a> (autumn/winter 2007). This sense of troubling histories working their way to the surface is expressed in the clothes themselves: in distressed fabric; screen-printed photographs; fragments of historical dress disassembled and reordered.</p>
<p>It is poignant, then, that McQueen’s work is increasingly read in the context of his own troubled past. His legacy is far more important than this. In his vividly original use of a gothic vocabulary to explore his own preoccupations, he offers a distilled expression of the preoccupations of our time.</p>
<hr>
<p><em><a href="http://www.vam.ac.uk/content/exhibitions/exhibition-alexander-mcqueen-savage-beauty/">Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty</a> runs from March 14 – August 2 2015 at The V&A.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/38544/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Catherine Spooner contributed a chapter to the Victoria and Albert Museum's publication Alexander McQueen, ed. Claire Wilcox.</span></em></p>In the designer’s embrace of this gothic past, he is an artist for our time.Catherine Spooner, Senior Lecturer in English, Lancaster UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.