Haute Goth

I had a dream last night . . . of course, I'm sketchy on the details . . . but it seemed to be one in which I was a romance novel heroine in the Victorian period and some fella was proposing to me.  And, of course, though I can't remember the details I remember the overall atmosphere of the dream: disturbing and anxious are the two adjectives that come to mind.

It is very clear why I dreamt this: not only have I been mostly reading romance novels I have also been working on my paper for the upcoming PCA conference. My paper this year is on the Gothic so I've been reading a lot of literary theory about it. It's turned my mind to mush. This is not the first vaguely Gothic dream I've had since beginning this paper. I will not bore you, gentle readers, with tales of my dreams. There's nothing so dull as hearing someone else describe what their brain fired at them during the night. Rather what I'd like to discuss today has to do with a small observation I have been coming to all these weeks of reading about the Gothic.

Not a lot get written anymore. At least not entirely. Certain books--and this applies to all genres not just romance--use elements of the Gothic in their plots, but there are very few proper Gothics written anymore. And by anymore I mean in the last twenty years. Now this is entirely an opnion on my part, but it seems to me that romantic suspense has taken the place of the Gothic as far as thrills and chills go but to my mind romantic suspense has more in common with film noir or the detective novel than with the Gothic.

In thinking about this I began to wonder what it was that was missing from modern stories that was fundamental to the classic Gothic tale. I have concluded that it is comes down to two factors. The first is that the classic Gothic cuts off the heroine almost entirely from the rest of world, either by actual imprisonment or by the remoteness of the setting. The second factor is the element that I will refer to as friend-or-foe or everyone's-a-suspect.  Not only is the heroine entirely cut off from the world at large but she hasn't any idea who to trust . . . now wait, that may be putting it too broadly. Let me try again. The second factor, friend-or-foe, is not simply that everyone is suspect but that there is not any definitive evidence that a threat even exists--making, paradoxically, the threat even more ominious because the heroine cannot even trust the evidence of her own eyes.  This creep factor, the one that gets your blood pumping and makes your eyes go all round as you stay up all night reading, that is what I think is missing in modern stories. The unreliability of the narrative that tricks both narrator and reader into being blind to who the true villain is.

I haven't read a book in a long time where I haven't figured out who the villain or the hero is by chapter two in probably five years. Sad! I remember being a teenager, riveted to a story, so entirely engrossed in the tale of woe and horror that I managed to forget all the cliches of the genre. I want that feeling back again.

So my question is: do you think I am right? Do you think there is a place in a contemporary world for a proper Gothic? How would one go about writing such a thing? How could you bring back the element of surprise to the genre? How would one go about defamiliarizing the plot elements?