I’ve spoken many times on this blog about how the Gothic genre originated in England with the publication of Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto, and I’ve gone on to enumerate many other early English writers of the Gothic, as well as several American authors that followed later on. But the Gothic was not limited to the English-speaking world. In fact, many of the early and influential pieces of Gothic literature originated in Continental Europe—specifically in Germany and France. Below, I’ve listed a few seminal works to take a broad look at the Gothic tradition in these two countries:
Faust by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1808)
Goethe’s Faust is a tragic play inspired by a popular character in German legend. The story of damned doctor named Faust had been around for centuries. Though originating in Germany, it was first dramatized in English by the Elizabethan playwright Christopher Marlowe in the 1500s. But it was Goethe’s adaptation of the story that brings it into the Gothic tradition. Published in 1808, Part One of the play shows how Faust, a scholar grown frustrated with his studies, encounters a devil named Mephistopheles who convinces him to bargain away his soul. Goethe elaborates on the original legend by adding a tragic romance with a woman named Gretchen. A second part to the play was published after Goethe’s death in 1832. The notion of a Faustian bargain has become a core trope in Gothic literature and can be seen in such other works as Charles Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer, Lord Byron’s Manfred, and Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray.
The Devil’s Elixirs [Die Elixiere des Teufels] by E. T. A. Hoffman (1815)
E. T. A. Hoffman was a Prussian author who is best known today for writing the novella that inspired Tchaikovsky’s ballet, The Nutcracker. He was a major figure in the German Romanticism movement and wrote prolifically on a variety of fantastica subjects. It should come as no surprise, then, that he would touch upon the Gothic. The Devil’s Elixirs was directly inspired by Matthew Lewis’s The Monk and shares a similar premise. Written in German, the story is told from the perspective of a monk named Medardus who drinks an elixir that awakens sensual desires and drives him to all sorts of wild actions. The novel makes extravagant use of the doppelgänger trope and was likely a major source of inspiration for Edgar Allan Poe’s William Wilson.
The Hunchback of Notre-Dame [Notre-Dame de Paris] by Victor Hugo (1831)
I’m sure you’re all familiar with the animated Disney film, but The Hunchback of Notre-Dame originated as a novel published by Victor Hugo, which blends the Gothic with French Romanticism. Continuing a time-honored Gothic tradition, the novel is titled after the piece of Gothic architecture in which it is set: the Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris. In fact, one of Hugo’s major motivations for writing the novel was to arouse public interest in the cathedral during an era when many such medieval structures were being neglected and demolished. The central characters of the story are the hunchback Quasimodo, who rings the bells in the cathedral, a beautiful gypsy woman named Esmeralda, and the villainous archdeacon Frollo. If you’ve only seen the Disney version, the book is much darker and the ending not quite happily ever after.
The Man-Wolf [Hugues-le-Loup] by Erckmann-Chatrian (1859)
This Gothic werewolf tale was authored by the French writing duo Émile Erckmann and Alexandre Chatrian and published under their joint pseudonym in 1859. It was translated into English and published as The Man-Wolf in 1876, helping to establish werewolves as one of the major monsters of Gothic literature. The story centers on a young man who travels to the nearby castle of Nideck, nestled in the Black Forest, where the local count is afflicted by a strange condition. As in any good Gothic novel, there’s a beautiful woman, and dark family legacy, and an ancient wrong that needs to be righted.
The Phantom of the Opera [Le Fantôme de l’Opéra] by Gaston Leroux (1910)
Half a century later, French literature gave us another Gothic gem: Gason Leroux’s novel, The Phantom of the Opera, which has been popularized for modern audiences by Andrew Lloyd Webber’s musical adaptation. Leroux substitutes a seemingly haunted opera house for the more traditional Gothic castle as the story’s setting. A young soprano named Christine Daaé fulfills the role of the innocent female protagonist, while the novel’s title character, the Phantom, is a somewhat sympathetic villain. The Phantom falls in love with Christine while mentoring her under the guise of the Angel of Music. When Christine falls in love with another man, the Phantom abducts her and takes her to his underground lair beneath the opera house. Circling back to the beginning of this post, several important plot events in Leroux’s novel occur amidst a performance of the opera Faust, one of many later interpretations of Goethe’s play.
While these French and German works of Gothic literature are not talked about as often as their English counterparts, they nonetheless had a significant impact on the genre. Have you read any of these works or any other French or German examples? Let me know in the comments!