Introducing Gothic Literature in the Classroom
Introducing Gothic Literature in the Classroom
It's far more than spooky and creepy stories
Welcome to From the Teacher’s Desk, where we take turns further reflecting on our episodes and applications to the classroom.
Alicia and I frequently discuss how we don’t love horror, yet we have definitely done our fair share of discussion about witches, zombies, and other spooky subjects. Perhaps it is more accurate to say that we don’t enjoy meaningless gore. We prefer stories that leave the most vivid images to our imaginations, which is what we’ve discovered through our appreciation of most things Gothic.
We love engaging narratives and we have discovered that Gothic literature is full of good stories. As we discuss in our episode on Wednesday, the Gothic literary field is vast and more complicated than most people realize, which makes it an ideal genre to introduce to any group of students.
Gothic literature crosses genres
Gothic literature isn’t all one thing. Jane Eyre and Dracula both qualify, even though the former is often seen as a romance and the latter as horror. Gothic literature doesn’t have to be scary; suspenseful moments are often intended to elicit an emotional response from the reader that connects them to the story instead of horrifying them.
When Alicia and I taught American literature together, we spent a few weeks discussing the Dark Romantics, including Poe and Irving. These American writers integrated the ideas of both the Romantic movement and Gothic literature from Great Britain, creating new genres that challenged readers to see their world in different and interesting ways.
Like all good literature, Gothic literature evolves with the times, as we see in the 21st century iterations of the Addams family. While the characters and the original message of acceptance and tolerance remain the same, the family has had to learn how to interact with a changing world. This can lead to interesting discussions when studying classic literature, as you show students how the past helps us inform the present. In fact, one of the reasons I enjoy currently teaching Dracula is that it gives me plenty of opportunities to discuss current themes that connect my students to a novel that was written over 100 years ago. (Here is my theme discussion assignment for Dracula, which does just that.)
Good Gothic literature is social commentary
One of my favorite books from my British Gothic Novel class in undergrad was the novel The Monk, by Matthew Gregory Lewis. The late 18th century novel discusses sex and religion and power, often in graphic language that actually shocked me as a late 20th century reader. Throughout the text, Lewis critiques the role of power in the Church, intentionally making the reader uncomfortable with many of the sinful practices that often stayed hidden from public view.
We see social commentary in other pieces as well. “The Devil and Tom Walker” criticizes greed and the slave trade. Edgar Allen Poe often spoke out against materialism in his stories and poetry. Hawthorne frequently criticized religious hypocrisy.
In fact, when I teach Dracula, I spend time looking at Victorian womanhood and pointing out to my students the different ways the women in Bram Stoker’s novel both epitomize and challenge the social norms of the time. You can find the jigsaw activity that I do with my students here. My follow-up activity for later in the novel can be found here.
It is a great time to introduce literary theory
When I started teaching Monsters and the Monstrous as a themes course, the previous teacher introduced me to Jeffrey Jerome Cohen’s Monster Theory. While it does focus on the monsters that create much of the backbone of horror fiction, the reality is that we find monsters—human and non-human—in nearly every kind of story we read.
But monster theory isn’t the only criticism you can cover when studying Gothic literature. As I’ve already demonstrated, much Gothic literature is full of opportunities for discussing feminism and historical context. Many of the stories are full of mysteries that need to be solved and investigation into our deepest fears. And we keep returning to this concept of colonization, something that transformed our world and continues to affect global politics.
A unit on different types of Gothic literature can give teachers the opportunity to discuss the ways different criticisms feed off of each other in literary study while connecting classic pieces to the modern literature those older pieces influenced. It can all be part of a cross-curricular and cross-cultural study in English Language Arts.
If you are looking for more on Cohen’s Monster Theory, you can access the Google Slides presentation I show my students here.
Gothic literature doesn’t have to be a study of scary or grotesque fiction. Instead, it can cover multiple genres and introduce your students to important lessons about the world they live in.
And don’t forget to listen to our episode about Wednesday to hear more practical application of Gothic literary analysis.
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I quite enjoy trying to figure out why a gothic text is scary even when it isn't ostensibly so, for example My Kinsman, Major Molineaux (Hawthorne) or Bartleby the Scrivener (Melville). I came across a great book on Gothic, called Gothic(!): https://terryfreedman.substack.com/p/review-of-gothic-an-illustrated-history