Category: Gothic Settings

Nautical Gothic

What could be more frightening than the crumbling spires of an ancient castle or the echoing halls of a cursed family’s ancestral home? How about the alien landscape of the open sea! With its unknowable depths and mercurial moods, the ocean is rife with mystery and danger. And out in the middle of the ocean, one can experience an isolation far more profound than even the most remote cliffside abbey. In many ways, the ocean is the perfect Gothic landscape. On any given voyage, a sailor might have to battle against the weather and natural environment, against monsters, against the restless dead, against the depravity and superstitious nature of his fellow man, or even against the phantasms of his own mind. Here are just a few examples of Gothic works that take place, in whole or in part, at sea:

Oil painting showing one ship being tossed about on rough waves while beside it is the faint, ghostly image of another, larger ship
Painting of the Flying Dutchman by Charles Temple Dix

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Gothic Settings: Asylums

Complete isolation within your padded cell walls. The screams and unintelligible ramblings of your fellow inmates. The torturous “treatments” that are more terrifying than the monsters in your own mind. What could make a better setting for horror than the madhouse? As popular as lunatic asylums still are in modern horror, this setting has its roots deep in Gothic literature—going back further than you might think. Indeed, like so many of the other recurring Gothic settings, these institutions lend themselves particularly well to Gothic tropes. Isolation and imprisonment are at the core of the asylum’s function. Any story set within its walls can use the spectacle of insanity as the engine of horror. And apart from madness itself, there are also the horrors of the cruel treatment, cramped spaces, and poor physical conditions that unfortunately characterize such institutions. 

Film still of Renfield clutching the bars of his window
Renfield in Dracula (1931)

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Gothic Settings: Abbeys and Monasteries

I’ve discussed before on this blog how the Gothic literary genre takes its name from the Gothic style of architecture. Appropriately, the medieval structures that typify this architectural style are often used as the backdrop to Gothic stories. The obvious example, and the very first structure I discussed in this series on Gothic settings, is the castle. But another place we see Gothic architecture from the Middle Ages is in religious buildings, such as monasteries and abbeys. 

Photo of a monastery in ruins on a grassy hill dotted with gravestones
A monastery in ruins

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Gothic Settings: Ancestral Homes

It’s time for another installment of Gothic Settings, a series of posts in which I explore recurring landscapes and structures that serve as the backdrop to innumerable Gothic stories. So far, we’ve explored such iconic settings as the classic castle and the romantic moors. This week’s setting is one of my very favorites: the ancestral home. 

Black and white photograph of the House of the Seven Gables in Salem
Early-20th-century photo of the House of the Seven Gables in Salem, the real-life inspiration for Hawthorne’s novel.

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Gothic Settings: The Moors

I’m back with another installment of my Gothic Settings series! In case you missed it, last month I decided to start exploring the particular environments and locales that repeatedly appear as the backdrops to Gothic stories by examining the most classic and iconic of settings: the castle. While the ancient and exotic aura of the castle captured the Gothic imagination from the genre’s start, this week I want to shift gears entirely to a setting closer to home for British writers: the moors.

Photo of green landscape with soft hills and low-lying vegetation
Photo of the North York moors by Andy Carne on Unsplash

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Gothic Settings: Castles

I’m starting a new blog post series! Much like my Gothic Tropes series, these posts will highlight recurring elements that appear time and again throughout different works of Gothic literature. But rather than focusing on plot elements, motifs, or themes, the Gothic Settings series will examine the physical locations in which these stories are set. Of course, I had to start off this week with the most obvious classic setting for a Gothic novel: the castle. 

Black and white illustration of a castle sitting on top of a rocky mountain peak
Illustration of Bran Castle in Transylvania by Charles Boner

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