Gothic psychology

Gothic fiction began around the Enlightenment period, when the truth claimed about religion was severely questioned. To test the limits of reason itself, encounters with ghostly figures were taken as Kantian attempts. Back in the 19th century, attention has derived towards the horror that lurks into our own psyche. Stories such as the celebrated Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde by Louis Stevenson draws the unconscious to a subject of attention.

According to Freud, all humans are haunted by a second nature, albeit a second self. This second identity that we have may be called one of repression. Indeed, the existence of the supernatural is this defined nature of repression. Hence, Freud stresses the duality of our nature. The eeriness of two selves is, as Freud explains, an irruption of disquiet caused by our separation from our mother’s womb. Freud’s theory is used to account the apparition of double figures such as Frankenstein and his Creature, Poe’s William Wilson, Dorian Gray and his portrait, and all the characters that play out the horror of duality.

While discussing these tales of criticism, many rendered the revelation of “social anxieties” that are shown in Gothic stories. In this context, mental illness is represented as a work of art and imagery. The linking of mental health and gothic lies prevalent and persistent. The Gothic si used as a tool to magnify the dark side of the soul by destabilizing influential fears and stigmatizing behaviours. It underscores on the dark elements of the psychiatric experience such as terrifying episodes of isolation, threatening institutions set in eerie landscapes, a sense of foreboding, claustrophobia and ultimately, entrapment. In this sense, Gothic stories are read as cautionary tales as they offer a social observation, reflection and warnings about what can happen when disorder, chaos and inhumanity are given free rein within the world.

As Anne Williams suggests, “Gothic conventions are possible fissures in the system of the symbolic as a whole”.

Mental illness–usually otherwise known as “insanity” or “madness” is, as many state, a common theme in Gothic literature. For instance, David Punter and Byron have defined the Southern Gothic genre as madness. The Gothic genre provides a new form of literature that is emphasized on the grotesque, the macabre and very often, the violent which investigates the madness, despair and decay. Above all those characteristics, it was suggested that the Gothic is defined by dark pasts of mental instability, such as in Charlotte’s “Jane Eyre” and Emily Jane Bronte’s “Wuthering Heights”.

A second Gothic trope is referred to as “the suspension between connectedness and separation”, which is also a characteristic of mental illness. The mistreatment of the insane, and the desolate locations where the deranged are incarcerated also often appear in Gothic novels. These depictions are so powerful that the horrors perpetrated by the asylum of the Gothic fiction echo through collective imagining and contemporary works.

Framed and bordered, the idea of the monster lying within remains as a strong feature of the Gothic. Suspension and frisson are factors that become both uncontrollable and controllable, familiar and once unfamiliar, vulnerable and deserting, yet innocent and unnervingly inscrutable. The supreme challenge imposed upon each character is for them to learn to conquer their own demons, and reclaim their human-ness.

For the individual, the decay of the integrated self is a recurrent theme and is a destabilizing and worrying aspect of each narrative, especially in terms of the anxiety generated around feeling/being simultaneously both normal and abnormal. The decay and demise of the family is a familiar trope in both the Gothic and films featuring mental illness, and is often a cause or symptom of the illness itself. Societal decay is certainly described in Gothic terms in certain Gothic works.

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