This essay will examine how gothic fiction is very deeply embedded in the culture and time period in which it was produced. This will be studied through looking at Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein and Horace Walpole’s novel The Castle of Otranto. With gothic fiction being produced during the age of enlightenment, the novels reflect a culture period of intellectualism that prised scientific enquiry and also questions morals and religion. Thus the period departed from the previous social system which
The Gothic is the study of the otherness; the unseen. It disturbs us as it is associated with anxiety, chaos, darkness, the grotesque and evokes images of death, destruction and decay. (Steele, 1997)According to Catherine Spooner in ‘Contemporary Gothic’ 2006, “The Gothic lurks in all sorts of unexpected corners.” It is incredibly broad - superstitions, the uncanny, the monstrous, the forgotten past, the Gothic feminine - to name but a few are all elements which combine to form this theme. The Gothic