My First Encounter With Gothic, by Mary Phelan
I can’t remember the very first time I encountered Gothic literature. For me, it was more a case of growing awareness, of tales about youths suffering the tyranny of the adults in whose institutional care they happened to be. And the medium that brought those tales home initially was television. As a child of the brightly lit twentieth century, I wondered where they all hailed from, these young people trapped in gloomy old houses and lost in rain-soaked landscapes, searching for a route to self-actualisation? I was in adolescence before I engaged with the literature that made these television epics possible.
I was fourteen when I found a copy of Jane Eyre in the school library on a Friday afternoon. I took it home and spent the entire evening reading the book. The next day, I resumed reading and stayed in my room until I finished, and then I sat for ages, wondering. Only a strict directive from my parents to join the family for Saturday evening tea brought me downstairs. But descend the staircase I did, declaring triumphantly, “It’s fine, I’ve read Jane Eyre.” A year or so later, I read Wuthering Heights by another Brontë sister. From then onward, I couldn’t find sagas enough of brooding heroes in old houses, and heroines trying to unravel family secrets.
Over the following years, I read voraciously, the remaining Brontë books, Sir Walter Scott, Dickens and Hardy. I didn’t bypass Jane Austen, and I laughed uproariously at her burlesque of the Gothic voiced in Northanger Abbey. And yes, I confess to bearing strands of protagonist Catherine Morland. I moved on to twentieth-century literature, Daphne Du Maurier, Shirley Jackson, Stephen King and Dean Koontz. But the voices of the older heroes and heroines still spoke to me: it was as if they wanted me to create something.
Following completion of my Masters in English literature, I embarked on another voyage. Beginning with Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto, I traced the progress of Gothic tropes through the eighteenth century to the present day. This voyage led to the writing and publication of my book, Wicked Uncles and Haunted Cellars: What the Gothic Heroine Tells Us Today (Greenwich Exchange).
In it, I discuss the endurance of the Gothic, and its continuing relevance in this technological environment. I explore how bright lights and smartphones will never vanquish the ghosts that preside within, and sometimes outside, ourselves. I refer to the nascent adolescent within all of us, and how we struggle constantly to cast off the bindings of banality and mediocrity that are even more of a threat to the personality than the monsters that lurk in the basement. Of course, I now write my own Gothic tales, but that is a story for another time.
