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What is the Gothic? | Key Elements of Gothic Literature & Film

As Nick Groom notes in The Gothic: A Very Short Introduction, “Type ‘Gothic’ into Google and you get over 250 million hits: images of ecclesiastical architecture, websites devoted to ‘bone-chilling’ literature, and opportunities to purchase alternative footwear….Trying to identify the original ‘Goths’, meanwhile, can lead either to an ancient barbarian race or to a rock music subculture of the 1980s” (2012). All these things are, in fact, gothic, a term with a varied yet related collection of meanings.

“Gothic” originally referenced tribes (Visigoths in the west, Ostrogoths in the east) most famous for invading Rome. The rise of the Goths is often considered the beginning of the “Dark Ages,” a misleading term for the period between the “fall” of the Roman Empire and the Renaissance. Stereotyped as a time of intellectual decline, the reality of the early Middle Ages was more complex. In fact, the Visigoths developed a code of law with comparatively progressive attitudes toward the rights of women and the practice of religion.

As Christianity spread across medieval Europe, cathedrals appeared across the continent in a style that sought to capture the magnificence of God for an illiterate public. This ornate, dramatic, and asymmetrical style of art and architecture, seen in the famous Notre Dame de Paris, was distinct from the symmetrical, ordered classical style exemplified by the Roman Pantheon. As the Renaissance aimed to revive classical ideals, Gothic acquired a new meaning: Giorgio Vasari deemed medieval architecture “Gothic,” meaning to debase the style as un-Roman and un-Enlightened. The name stuck, without its necessarily pejorative connotation. 

In The Gothic Cathedral, Otto Georg Von Simson writes that the defining features of Gothic architecture are not its feats of engineering — vaulted ceilings, pointed arches, flying buttresses — or its soaring height, but its “two aspects…without precedent and parallel: the use of light and the unique relationship between structure and appearance” (2020, [1989]). Through light and space, architects aimed, Von Simpson argues, to reflect God in stone:

The Gothic Cathedral

The cathedral was the house of God, this term understood not as a pale commonplace but as fearful reality. The Middle Ages lived in the presence of the supernatural, which impressed itself upon every aspect of human life. The sanctuary was the threshold to heaven. (1989, [2020])

Yet, there was a dark side to Gothic architecture in its shadowy corridors, depictions of hellish torment, and monstrous gargoyles leering overhead. The violence of the Reformation added another layer of less-than-heavenly associations with Gothic architecture: iconoclasts left Europe’s religious structures in ruins and the remains of Gothic architecture haunted.

In the 17th- and early 18th-centuries Gothicism was again transformed: the Goths were reimagined as forerunners to modern society, early Christians who stood against the excesses of paganism and provided an example for curtailing absolutist monarchies. Gothic ruins became popular sites to visit for poetic inspiration or historical reflection. Cultural fascination with medieval customs and architecture helped spark the Gothic literary tradition that emerged in the 1760s.

A naïve young woman finds herself in a vast and mysterious house, filled with unsavory secrets. A guilt-ridden monk is tormented by visions of past wrongs — are they dreams or spectres? A scientist labors in a candlelit laboratory as rain pounds against the window. These are recognizably gothic scenes. But what makes them so?

The Gothic is, in many ways, a formula, a collection of plot devices, character types, and other tropes that can be rearranged and subverted to tell a story — and incorporated into works of any genre.

Let's take a look at some key gothic elements and tropes.

Since Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764), authors have loved setting gothic stories in scary structures — castles, monasteries, cathedrals, and houses. Gothic spaces are often labyrinthine or difficult to navigate, containing secret passageways, shadowy corners, crumbling walls, forbidden rooms, and dramatic architectural features (staircases, towers, dungeons, crypts). Glance through the horror movies released in any given year, and you’ll soon notice that many stage their terrors in a single prominent location — whether that structure is haunted by undead presences (The Amityville Horror), terrorized by man-made horrors (Psycho, Get Out), or home to both (The Shining). 

The Gothic also frequents settings which are sublime. Edmund Burke uses sublime to describe intense feelings of pain and danger which can be pleasurable to us “at certain distances, and with certain modifications.” Sublime landscapes often force us to confront our smallness in the face of nature — high mountains, frozen tundras, deep oceans.

“It was a dark and stormy night….” Or, as Mary Shelley writes in Frankenstein (1818), “It was on a dreary night of November, that I beheld the accomplishment of my toils.” The mood of the Gothic translates into its literal gloomy atmosphere, rife with rain, lightning, mist, wind, and fog. The cold, damp, and dark obscure the sun during the day, while pale moonlight lights the gothic night. 

Take this passage from Jane Eyre (1847), when Jane is wandering alone after leaving Mr. Rochester,

Jane Eyre

I lay still a while: the night-wind swept over the hill and over me, and died moaning in the distance; the rain fell fast, wetting me afresh to the skin. Could I but have stiffened to the still frost — the friendly numbness of death — it might have pelted on: I should not have felt it; but my yet living flesh shuddered to its chilling influence.

Here, the weather both reflects and creates the genre’s characteristic melancholy.

Gothic literature has spawned all sorts of nightmarish beings — vampires, werewolves, zombies, demons. These monsters come from nature (Godzilla), from the past (Dracula), from our own creation (Frankenstein’s creature), or from within (Dr. Jekyll’s evil counterpart, Mr. Hyde). Monsters are transgressors, refusing to play by the rules as they prey upon our fears and our desires. (See our study guide on monster theory for more.) 

Some works of Gothic literature feature a literal monster, while others depict humans who behave monstrously, including sadists, serial killers, and sexual predators. Gothic monsters help us interrogate the boundaries between human and nonhuman, acceptability and depravity, goodness, and evil.

Things just don’t seem to stay dead in the Gothic. Ghosts haunt the genre, terrifying characters, possessing them, or warning them of danger. The genre explores the boundary between life and death through beings that transcend them, and ghosts also allow the Gothic to emphasize that particular feeling that won’t let the past rest: guilt. 

The past always seems to return in the Gothic; wrongs demand to be righted, unsated figures seek revenge, and traumatic events resurface. These ghosts may not be literal, but they are felt: for example, in Daphne Du Maurier’s Gothic romance, Rebecca (1938), the protagonist is tormented by comparisons between her and her husband’s late wife, Rebecca. The narrator feels Rebecca’s presence throughout the house and must deal with the consequences of her (and her husband’s) past actions. Even objects in the Gothic seem to have lives of their own; doors mysteriously slam shut and portraits watch from the walls.

Strange families are common in Gothic literature. Characters are haunted by the loss of significant family members or by wrongdoings which continue to curse the family line. Complex family trees allow for reveals of unknown relatives and inheritances. The Gothic wonders how much your family dictates who you are and how difficult it is to break from familial expectations. 

Incest is also a common gothic trope. In Gothic Incest: Gender, Sexuality and Trangression, Jenny DiPlacidi argues that,

Gothic incest: Gender, Sexuality and Transgression

representations of incest are revealed as synonymous with the Gothic as a whole: complex, multifaceted and consciously resistant to the dominant social and sexual hegemonies in their models of alternative agencies, sexualities, forms of desire and family structures. (2018)

The Gothic loves damsels in distress: women in danger, pursued or held captive by monsters and monstrous men who threaten them with physical violence and sexual transgression. These gothic heroines — beautiful, waifish, fragile — swoon and shriek in terror. 

Henry Fusili’s painting The Nightmare captures the dramatic distress of the gothic heroine. A beautiful woman lies with a demon crouched on her torso. Her white dress hugs her body, and her long neck invites a kiss or a monster’s bite. The painting’s combination of horrific and seductive elements exemplifies the impulse to see beauty alongside and within pain, fear, and death.

While gothic heroines may seem helpless and naïve, they often need to be clever and resourceful in order to save themselves. In Dracula (1897), Mina Harker is not just the vampire’s victim; she plays an integral role in defeating him, drawing upon her knowledge of the train tables and battling Dracula alongside the men.

Male gothic protagonists are conflicted, solitary, tortured, brooding, and secretive. The “Byronic hero” — modeled after famous poet and infamous womanizer Lord Byron — rides the line between hero and villain, sometimes a darkly seductive charmer, sometimes a cold and sullen loner. The mercurial Mr. Rochester manipulates Jane even as he is tormented by his secret past; the melancholy Victor Frankenstein alternates between self-aggrandizing and self-loathing, racked with guilt from his actions and inaction.

Another version of this tortured type is the sympathetic monster — Frankenstein’s creature, the Phantom of the Opera, Edward Scissorhands. Rather than clinging to power while brooding on their bad actions, these figures are usually disempowered and tortured by their own existence more than anything they’ve done.

The heroine slowly walks down the hallway. Tense string music plays in the background, and she tightens her grip on the weapon in her hand as she moves in and out of shadow. The music swells, and you hold your breath as you wait for something to happen.  

This feeling of tension and suspense is core to the gothic aesthetic. The genre plays with psychological intensity and anticipation as much as it releases into outbursts of violence.

The Gothic also embraces melodrama. Dramatic events occur and characters respond in kind — women swoon, men rage and lash out. Inner torment is expressed in displays of “madness,” and characters become physically ill as a result of moral failure, psychological distress, or bad weather. 

Doubling is another common trope in the Gothic. Some stories, like Edgar Allan Poe’s “William Wilson” (1839), feature doppelgangers, people who look exactly alike. But gothic doubles can take other forms too — twins, reflections, separate characters who begin to merge into one. In Carmilla (1847), Laura and Carmilla grow more alike and codependent: “you and I are one for ever,” Carmilla declares.

In The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890), Dorian’s double is his decaying portrait which allows him to remain forever young. This doubling, as with Jekyll and Hyde, allows for an examination of the duplicity of man and the difference between appearances and true nature. 

In her introduction to the 1831 edition of Frankenstein, Mary Shelley writes about her inspiration for the novel,

Frankenstein

When I placed my head on my pillow, I did not sleep, nor could I be said to think. My imagination, unbidden, possessed and guided me, gifting the successive images that arose in my mind with a vividness far beyond the usual bounds of reverie. I saw—with shut eyes, but acute mental vision,—I saw the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together. (1831)

The book came to Shelley in a dream, fitting for a story which features powerful dreams of its own. Sleep is often disrupted in Gothic texts by visions and nightmares which reveal desires, fears, or dangers.

The Gothic is more than the sum of its parts: it is invested in particular themes which can be adapted to different times, locations, and political agendas. Broadly, the Gothic depicts transgressions, both of behavioral norms (sexual deviance, gender subversion, moral wrongdoings) and of seemingly fixed boundaries (self and other, life and death, past and present, man and monster). Dwelling often in the spaces between these categories, the Gothic often aims to evoke an ambivalent feeling of pleasure and pain, attraction and repulsion. Fear, the popularity of the Gothic seems to say, can feel pretty good. 

Theoretical concepts often helpful for analyzing Gothic texts include the unheimlich/uncanny (Freud), the abject (Kristeva), the grotesque, the liminal, the monstrous, the sublime (Burke), the fantastic (Todorov; Rabkin), the weird (Fisher), and the eerie (Fisher).

The Gothic novel pushes back against the Enlightenment’s view of the world as rational, disenchanted, and comprehensible through human experimentation and exploration. As William Hughes, David Punter, and Andrew Smith write in The Encyclopedia of the Gothic,

The Encyclopedia of the Gothic

The Gothic pursues a seemingly messier version of what it means to be a person than that articulated in early natural philosophies and suggests that the world is a more complex place than Enlightenment science would have us believe. However, this is, of course, a simplification. The Gothic represents an attempt not to destroy coherence but to provide an alternative context within which meaning is discussed. The Gothic is thus founded on a model idea of debate and interrogation and functions as a form of radical skepticism that, paradoxically, seems to echo the Enlightenment emphasis on interrogation and testing as a way of getting at some semblance of the truth.

Some of the earliest criticism on gothic aesthetics was produced by the prolific Gothic novelist Ann Radcliffe. Building on Edmund Burke’s work, Radcliffe defined “terror” and “horror,” drawing a distinction between them — and the two emerging strains of Gothic novel. In the posthumously published essay “On the Supernatural in Poetry” (1826), she writes that terror and horror are “so far opposite, that the first expands the soul, and awakens the faculties to a high degree of life; the other contracts, freezes, and nearly annihilates them” (1826). 

Radcliffe champions terror, arguing that terror relies on an obscured or anticipated fear, something felt rather than faced, whereas horror results from the shock and awe of confronting something ghastly. Terror is evoked when the image is “not distinctly pictured forth, but is seen in glimpses through obscuring shades, the great outlines only appearing, which excite the imagination to complete the rest…. Obscurity leaves something for the imagination to exaggerate” (1826). This distinction between terror and horror remains a method for analyzing the Gothic and continues to be reinterpreted by scholars. (See Locating Ann Radcliffe for more on Radcliffe’s writing and aesthetics.)

Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764) is traditionally considered the first Gothic novel, in part because Walpole added the subtitle “A Gothic Story” to its second edition. Originally presented as a translation of a lost 16th-century manuscript, the novel takes place in a medieval Italian castle, reflecting the period’s fascination with a mysterious and romanticized gothic past. Otranto established many elements that became characteristic of the Gothic: elaborate and eerie architecture, a gloomy atmosphere, a vengeful past, seemingly supernatural events, religious imagery, disguised identities, and — of course — the dead and undead. As Annie Pécastaings writes in her introduction to Otranto, “The character types who inhabit Otranto’s landscape have become staples of the Gothic novel: Isabella (Frederic’s daughter) is the novel’s maiden in distress, Manfred its lustful villain, and Father Jerome its mysterious holy monk” (2009).

In the decades following the publication of Otranto, the Gothic novel flourished in books like William Beckford’s licentious, Orientalist tale, Vathek (1786); Matthew Lewis’ moralist romance The Monk (1796); Ann Radcliffe’s popular, pioneering novels including The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) and The Italian (1797); and Mary Shelley’s masterpiece and progenitor of science fiction, Frankenstein (1818).

By 1803, the Gothic novel had become so popular and recognizable that Jane Austen completed wrote a parody of the genre, Northanger Abbey (although the novel was not published until 1817). Charles Maturin’s meandering Melmouth, The Wander (1820) was once considered the bookend to the period of the proper Gothic novel, but this strict periodization quickly falls apart. Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1847) and her sister Charlotte’s Jane Eyre (1847) contain many gothic elements, and some of the Gothic’s most famous creations arise much later in the century— J. Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla (1872), Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886), Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890), and Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897). While these later works were once considered revivals of an earlier mode or simply not Gothic, Gothic criticism now tracks a longer tradition across several cross-pollinating periods of development. 

In the Victorian era, Gothic subgenres like the detective story, ghost story, and adventure story took shape, along with urban Gothic stories of London and the “suburban Gothic” of sensation fiction. Jarlath Killeen writes in History of the Gothic: Gothic Literature 1825–1914: 

History of the Gothic: Gothic Literature 1825-1914

Just as the development of urban Gothic shows how modernity is considered to produce horrors of its own not reducible to the anachronistic or to history, so the suburban thrills of Sensation Fiction demonstrate categorically that, far from bringing enlightenment, modernity produces monsters. (2009)

Toward the fin de siècle and early twentieth century, the Gothic became a useful mode for addressing fears arising from a modernizing, secularizing, overextended British empire. (See our study guide on the fin de siècle for more on this period.)

The twentieth century provided plenty of new fears for the Gothic to tap into. In History of the Gothic: Twentieth-Century Gothic, Lucie Armitt writes that the “real-life horror of two world wars takes over from the imagined horrors of the supernatural and/or superstition” (2011). Threats of nuclear war, serial killers, and the HIV/AIDS epidemic sparked their own gothic interpretations, and the haunted house, an element of the Gothic since Walpole’s castle, rose to particular prominence, whether representing the destruction of war in Europe or American suburbia. Armitt argues that the twentieth century oriented the Gothic toward “threats we believe face our children,” evidenced by “the monster narratives the media constructs around ‘the paedophile’, ‘the child abductor’, ‘the child murderer’, ‘the child abuser’” (2011). 

The development of cinema brought Gothic to the silver screen; the 1930s and 1940s created a group of classic monsters — Boris Karloff as the creature in Frankenstein (1931), Bela Lugosi as the titular Dracula (1931), Henry Hull as a Werewolf of London (1935) — and, over the course of the century, Alfred Hitchock pioneered the visual Gothic. The 1960s through 1980s welcomed a proliferation of horror films and franchises, while more recently the Gothic has been shaped by the paranormal romance craze from Ann Rice to Stephanie Meyer.

As the Gothic expands, so does its definition and the scholarship around it. Armitt writes:

History of the Gothic: Twentieth-Century Gothic

Unlike the origins of Gothic, which clustered around a specific, but small, group of writers, thinkers and painters…, twentieth-century reignition of interest in the contemporary Gothic has us reeling in terms of how best to tame this amorphous and ever-expanding ‘monster’. (2011)

The Gothic tradition is still alive and well, and it reaches far beyond the traditional novel, if it was ever confined there in the first place. Samuel Coleridge’s poem “Christabel” (1816), Richard Brinsley Peake’s play Presumption; or, the Fate of Frankenstein (1823), and Edgar Allan Poe’s poetry and short stories infuse non-novelistic forms with gothic tropes and themes. Today, the Gothic can be found in video games and tv shows, music and graphic novels. In addition to growing literature on Gothic subgenres — Rural Gothic, New Urban Gothic, Postfeminist Gothic —  there is increasing scholarship on regional Gothic traditions across the globe — Nordic Gothic, Irish Gothic, Australian Gothic, South Asian Gothic, South African Gothic. While the Gothic relies on recognizable conventions, it endlessly adapts to new locations, mediums, and monsters.

Like “Gothic,” “horror” as a genre signifier is difficult to define. While “horror” may at first bring to mind popular film franchises like Halloween and Scream, Darryl Jones points out that horror is not necessarily modern or low brow (2021). He argues that tragedy is highbrow horror; images from Sophocles and Euripides (Oedipus gouging out his own eyes, Pentheus’ mother tearing her son apart, Medea murdering her children) would be right at home in the latest splatter film.

While horror and the Gothic are certainly related — today’s horror literature can be traced back to the Gothic novel — the exact relationship between Gothic and horror as genres is contested. Jones files horror under the umbrella of the Gothic; whereas other kinds of Gothic texts can prioritize “terror” (as Radcliffe defined it), fears that remain obscured, imagined, or psychological, “horror” is a specific mode of the Gothic invested in, well, horror — in bodily/corporeal fear and revulsion. 

In Haunted Seasons, Derek Johnston takes the inverse approach, seeing the Gothic as a subgenre of horror — though defining these terms is especially difficult given that the label “Gothic” is so often applied by scholars after the fact rather than arising in original discourses around the texts. Johnston writes,

Haunted Seasons: Television Ghost Stories for Christmas and Horror for Halloween

As a genre, horror is one that is regularly left undefined, presumably with the assumption that people know it when they see it…. The Gothic, on the other hand, is subject to many definitions, even when simply considering literary and media Gothic rather than, say, the architectural, the musical, or the subcultural. (2015)

In film criticism, the distinction between terror and horror can be helpful for categorizing films as Gothic or horror, categories that may borrow from each other but are ultimately separate — the subtle and suggestive Gothic hinting at partially visible terrors, dwelling in shadows, psychological manifestations, and hauntings. Horror, on the other hand, is often seen as heavily graphic and explicit, employing (often gratuitous) gore and violence. 

As helpful as this division can be, Xavier Aldana Reyes writes in Gothic Cinema that “the alignment of the cinematic Gothic with the horrifically acceptable or less extreme runs the risk of stigmatising more transgressive films and of denying horror (as it is understood in this taxonomy) its own potential value as more than a collection of gruesome moments” (2019). Moreover, not all non-visceral horror films are Gothic: Reyes cites Alien (1979), which “does not rely on particularly visceral numbers to generate its scares and its monster stays out of focus for most of the film” but can be “described as science fiction horror” or else risk stretching the Gothic until it loses meaning (2019). Conversely, horror has no monopoly on blood, sex, and violence; the Gothic, too, can be graphic. 

The case study below details how the Gothic and horror operate alongside one another in cinema, combining “terror” and “horror” to craft a thrilling film.

Guillermo del Toro’s 2015 film Crimson Peak engages with the Gothic tradition, both celebrating and subverting the genre while incorporating elements of horror. The film is self-aware in its deployment of gothic tropes; its title card is the cover of a book, which opens to let the viewer inside, intentionally locating the film as part of a literary lineage. 

Crimson Peak follows the American heiress Edith Cushing (Mia Wasikowska) as she marries the mysterious English baronet Thomas Sharpe (Tom Hiddleston) and moves to his English estate, Allerdale Hall — nicknamed “Crimson Peak” because of the warm red clay which seeps up through the snow in winter.

The film borrows its core elements from the Gothic romance (think Rebecca [1938] and its predecessor, Jane Eyre [1847]) — a young woman suddenly attached to a man she doesn’t really know, a gloomy manor house with forbidden rooms, a cold and hostile housekeeper  the haunting presence (literal or metaphorical) of a past wife (or wives), an investigation into the man’s secrets. Crimson Peak mirrors themes of early Gothic novels by featuring familial strife, sexual transgression (including incest), and a young woman preyed upon for her money; it also draws upon the Victorian Gothic, incorporating a detective story and modernizing technology (Thomas’s clay mining machine, wax phonographic cylinders, glass plate photography). 

The gothic decadence of Crimson Peak — the heroine walking slowly through the halls of a crumbling mansion with a candelabra in hand, her white nightgown trailing behind her and a ghostly portent ringing in her ears — is punctuated by bloody moments of horror.

The above scene begins firmly in the realm of the Gothic: Edith dreams of wandering  sparse moorland , and a ghostly figure points in the direction she should go. Edith awakens and coughs, leaving a red stain on her white pillowcase and pale fingertips (the contrast of colors is a gothic element particularly well-suited to film). Standing as she senses an otherworldly presence, she raises the candelabra to light the dim room and extends her hand, inviting the ghost to touch her. A shadow moves across the background, momentary and incorporeal. Her breath comes heavy and her eyes dart around as the scene builds its tension. Suddenly, Edith’s hand is pulled to the floor by an unseen force, and someone screams in the bathroom. The threats are sensed but still not clearly seen. Edith’s face is cast in shadow and  her body is framed by the crack in the door as we watch her slowly move through it and into the bathroom. There, she finds a ghost resting in the bathtub, a meat cleaver lodged in its skull. This image is one of horror: the massive weapon, the deformed body, the bloody red. Edith runs into the hallway and encounters another horrifying specter, the floor below it wet and shining with blood, its bones crunching as it lurches toward her.

Crimson Peak employs elements of the Gothic and horror to craft a film both suspenseful and visceral. Xavier Aldana Reyes notes that,

Gothic Cinema

one of Crimson Peak’s distinguishing features is its clay-red ghosts, halfway between the ethereal and the gory, and the aggressive nature of scenes like the face-stabbing of Thomas. (2019)

Its particularly violent ending delivers the viscerality of horror within the Gothic aesthetic, the white snow stained red with clay and blood. The film plays with shadow, color, and framing, honoring a history of Gothic aesthetics on screen whilst taking them in new directions. Through Crimson Peak, we see how the Gothic and horror are intertwined and how tropes of both can be continuously combined, reorganized, and subverted to tell compelling and frightening stories on page and screen alike.   

One method of analyzing and categorizing Gothic literature is by separating it into two traditions, “male” and “female” Gothic, often represented by the respective writings of Matthew Lewis and Ann Radcliffe. This division in part aligns with the distinction Radcliffe offered between horror and terror — the male Gothic tending toward shocking sights, the female Gothic preferring obscured or anticipated fears.

The distinction between male and female Gothic is also a difference in perspective: the male Gothic inhabits the psychology of the villain, or at least a flawed and tortured leading figure, while the female Gothic (first coined by Ellen Moers) focuses its lens on the persecuted protagonist — often a young woman — and the domestic space she risks entrapment within.

As Carol Davison writes in History of the Gothic: Gothic Literature 1764–1824, the male Gothic subverted Enlightenment ideals and patriarchal institutions through scenes of horrific depravity and interruptions of the supernatural, while the female Gothic “often rendered the violation of such ideals in veiled, sexualized terms, in keeping with the nature of the threats experienced by women” — threats that were not supernatural but manmade (2009). The female Gothic’s proclivity for disturbed domestic spaces contains a critique of the institutions women writers found themselves disregarded by and incarcerated within. Davison writes, “The Female Gothic castle/house … mirrors woman’s ‘ambivalent experience of entrapment and longing for protection’ within these institutions” (2009).

While meaningful scholarship has arisen out of an interest in the female Gothic, the term is a contested one. Is the female Gothic necessarily feminist, or is “feminist Gothic” another subgenre? Is the female Gothic necessarily by or about women? What about women who write Gothic stories that mainly feature men, or feature women in ways that do not resemble the typical “female Gothic” — and men who writes stories that do? Does the term emphasize the ways that women’s writers use the Gothic to highlight their particular experiences and concerns, or does it risk gender essentializing and implying that women can only write Gothic stories about domestic fears? 

In The Female Gothic: New Directions, Diana Wallace and Andrew Smith interrogate the term for the 21st-century, addressing how the female Gothic is shaped by, challenges, and complicates issues of national identity, sexuality, language, race, and history. As new writers “transform and renew the form,” they write:

The Female Gothic: New Directions

we need to retain a sense of history, of the line which runs from even further back than Radcliffe …  down to Toni Morrison and to the new ‘postfeminist Gothic’ of Buffy and her peers. Retaining the term ‘Female Gothic’ as a broad and fluid category – while both interrogating it and acknowledging its many mutations (feminist Gothic, lesbian Gothic, comic Gothic, postfeminist Gothic) – is one way of doing this. (2009)

Gothic politics: conservative or radical? 

Although the Gothic persistently explores what happens when boundaries are transgressed, it is not necessarily transgressive as a genre. The Gothic can deliver messages both conservative and progressive, oppressive and liberatory. At once, the genre allows the writer and reader to indulge in “deviant” desires while often condemning, or, at least, containing, them. 

J. Sheridan Le Fanu spends most of Carmilla (1872) exploring Laura’s simultaneous feelings of attraction and repulsion toward the alluring Carmilla. The author permits the reader to experience an otherwise unacceptable homoerotic connection between two young women. Of course, the “threat” must eventually be expelled: Carmilla is killed, heteronormativity reasserted as the rightful norm. But the book, like many Gothic texts, is ambivalent: Laura remains infatuated with Carmilla even after her death.

Gothic villains, particularly those of the supernatural variety, are often threats to the normative institutions. Dracula is an outsider, a foreigner from “the East”, who threatens the establishment and promises to proliferate until Protestant England has been overrun with his kind. Stoker’s text is rife with racist, antisemitic, and anti-Catholic tropes, and Dracula bristles Victorian norms with his seductive power, polygamy, and gender transgression. He is a composite representation of the fears faced by the British Empire at the fin de siècle.

Yet, in its aim to depict the transgressive, hidden, and repressed, the Gothic has always held radical potential. Early gothic villains included people in positions of power, such as hypocritical clergymen or violent family patriarchs, inviting critique of the institutions they represented. Modern writers like Angela Carter, Toni Morrison, Jewelle Gomez, Sarah Waters, Jeanette Wintersson, Carmen Maria Machado, Silvia Moreno-Garcia, and Stephen Graham Jones embrace the possibilities of the Gothic to tell complex stories that resist hegemonic narratives. 

Disabled artist Riva Lehrer in Golem Girl: A Memoir and trans theorist Susan Stryker in “My Words to Victor Frankenstein Above the Village of Chamounix: Performing Transgender Rage” identify with Frankenstein’s creature, reframing conversations from the point of view of the “monster.” In response to transphobic comments, Stryker says:

The Transgender Studies Reader Remix

When such beings as these tell me I war with nature, I find no more reason to mourn my opposition to them—or to the order they claim to represent—than Frankenstein’s monster felt in its enmity to the human race. I do not fall from the grace of their company—I roar gleefully away from it like a Harley-straddling, dildo-packing leatherdyke from hell. (2022)

While the Gothic can condemn the monstrous, the transgressive, the inexplicable, it can also echo Stryker’s words: “I challenge you to risk abjection and flourish as well as have I. Heed my words, and you may well discover the seams and sutures in yourself” (2022).

Additional Gothic literature & film resources on Perlego

Key Concepts in the Gothic by William Hughes

The Routledge Companion to the Gothic, edited by Catherine Spooner and Emma McEvoy

Queer Others in Gothic Fiction: Transgressing Monstrosity by Ardel Haefele-Thomas

Haunted Property: Slavery and the Gothic by Sarah Gilbreath Ford

Post-Millennial Gothic: Comedy, Romance and the Rise of Happy Gothic by Catherine Spooner

Amitt, L. (2011). History of the Gothic: Twentieth-Century Gothic. University of Wales Press. 

Austen, J. (1817; 2009). Northanger Abbey. Barnes & Noble.

Burke, E. (1757; 2009). A Philosophical Enquiry into the Sublime and Beautiful. Routledge.

Davison, C. (2009). History of the Gothic: Gothic Literature 1764–1824. University of Wales Press.

Groce, J. (2014). An Introduction to Gothic Architecture. University Press.

Groom, N. (2015). The Gothic: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford University Press.

Hughes, W., Punter, D., & Smith A. (2015). The Encyclopedia of the Gothic. Wiley-Blackwell.

History.com editors. “Goths and Visigoths.” History.com, 2019. Available at: https://www.history.com/topics/ancient-rome/goths-and-visigoths 

Johnston, D. (2015). Haunted Seasons: Television Ghost Stories for Christmas and Horror for Halloween. Palgrave Macmillan.

Jones, D. (2021). Horror: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford University Press.

Killeen, J. (2009). History of the Gothic: Gothic Literature 1825–1914. University of Wales Press.

Le Fanu, J.S. (1872; 2013). Carmilla, ed. Costello-Sullivan, K. Syracuse University Press. 

Lloyd-Smith, A. (2002). American Gothic Fiction. Continuum.

Moers, E. (1978). Literary Women. Women’s Press.

Moscicki, O. “Imagining a ‘gothic disability’: literary genre, political theory, and living disabled in Riva Lehrer’s portraiture,” Disability & Society, 2022.

Radcliffe, A. “On the Supernatural in Poetry.” Gothic Digital Series @ UFSC, 2017.

Smith, A. & Bennet, M. (2020). Locating Anne Radcliffe. Routledge.

Stoker, B. (1897; 2012). Dracula. William Collins.

Stryker, S. & Blackston, D.M. (2022). The Transgender Studies Reader Remix. Routledge.

Wallace, D. & Smith, A. (2009). The Female Gothic: New Directions. Palgrave Macmillan.

Walpole, H. (1764; 2009). The Castle of Otranto. Barnes & Noble.

Key Elements of Gothic Literature & Film

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Utopia vs. Dystopia | Key Differences, Meaning & Examples

“Utopia” is a play on words. It combines the Greek word topos (“place”) with the prefix “u,” simultaneously meaning eutopia (“good place”) and outopia (“no place”). This double meaning reveals both the truth and paradox of utopia. Utopia is “the good place that is no place” (Sargisson and Sargent, 2004, [2016]). 

As Lyman Tower Sargent writes, a utopia is a “non-existent society described in considerable detail and normally located in time and space that the author intended a contemporaneous reader to view as considerably better than the society in which that reader lived” (2010). A utopia is a society that is better than contemporary society, but it does not exist here or yet. The pessimistic interpretation of this double meaning emphasizes outopia: one can dream of eutopia, but it will always remain an unrealized and unrealizable fantasy.

Thomas More introduced the term as the title of his 1516 book Utopia, considered the first utopian novel. More begins with a scathing satire of current English society before transporting readers to Utopia, an idyllic island with its own social, political, and economic structures. More embraces the ambiguity of the word utopia, offering no clear answer to whether utopia is an attainable reality or an unreachable dream. Mark Stephen Jendrysik emphasizes another layered aspect of the text:

Utopia

More’s Utopia was not just a savage critique of the injustices of his times. Nor was it simply speculation about a state that, if made real, would create a just community. More’s work was also a lighthearted entertainment for his friends. [...] If utopia is a desire or a dream, More reminds us to approach it with a light heart. (Utopia, 2020)

Whether charming dreams or serious visions, utopias all begin with the understanding that there is something lacking in current society and something better can be imagined. In common and scholarly uses of “utopia,” there sometimes surfaces an assumption that utopian means perfect. While certainly utopias strive for a more perfect world, Sargent takes issue with placing the burden of perfection on utopias. He argues that “perfection has never been a characteristic of utopian fiction” — More’s Utopia itself was not perfect (1994). Jendrysik sees utopia as a continuum, with “efforts at reform” at one end and “the complete overhaul of society” at the other. Utopias are better worlds, but they are not flawless ones.

Scholars struggle to define utopia. Is every story about a seemingly good fictional place a utopian one? How do we determine whether the society is “good” — is this based on the author’s intentions, or our experience reading the text? How do we categorize intentional communities, utopian experiments that claim to be “real” utopias?

Sargent proposes that there are three faces of utopia: literary works, intentional communities, and social/political theory. Though distinguishable, the three faces of utopia heavily inform each other. Social and political theory influences the goals of intentional communities; political thinkers advance their ideas through fiction. Here, we examine and provide a brief history of each type of utopia.

Although More’s Utopia is the first utopian novel, utopian ideas have been present in storytelling traditions for thousands of years. Almost every culture has developed some mythic utopia, from Eden to the Greek Golden Age — a long ago period of harmony and abundance described by Hesiod in Works and Days (c. 8th–9th century BCE). These mythic utopias looked backward to a lost arcadia or forward to a future paradise after an apocalypse or beyond death. Sargent calls these utopias “body utopias”; they are grounded in sensual gratification rather than societal structures; the utopia is supplied by nature and/or the gods, not constructed by man.

Man-made utopias, on the other hand, are what Sargent calls “city utopias.” The most cited early example of a city utopia is Plato’s Republic (c. 375 BCE). Plato seeks to define justice by imagining the ideal city-state, grappling with questions utopians to the present day continue to explore: What does a just state look like? What structures of government would be needed to create such a state? What would be prohibited in order to maintain it? (Plato bans dramatic poetry from his ideal republic, for example.)

More’s Utopia marked a shift from the ancient world’s treatment of literary utopias. Rather than envisioning a paradise of the far past or a heaven in the distant future, More and his imitators placed utopia in the present. Merlin Coverley writes in Utopia (2012) that authors of the early modern utopian revival inserted historical facts and supporting materials like maps and letters to make their creations seem credible: 

Utopias had always been a reflection of the societies that had produced them, but the border between fact and fiction was now less clear than ever before, as utopia became, for the first time, a plausible and fully realised destination.

Notable literary utopias following More include Tommaso Campanella’s City of the Sun (completed 1602, first published 1623), Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis (1627), and Margaret Cavendish’s The Blazing World (1666), the first recorded English utopia by a female writer.

In the eighteenth century, European literary utopias often depicted voyages to faraway lands, only to discover reflections of contemporary European society and offer more overt critiques of contemporary society than earlier utopias. Notable works of this era include Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726), Voltaire’s Candide (1759), and Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719), although Sargent argues there is no utopia here because there is no society.

The nineteenth century witnessed rapid changes like the dominance of industrial capitalism, experiments with utopian living communities, the spread of new technologies, vast and unequal increases in wealth, and disruptions to traditional family structures, gender roles, and modes of labor. Predictions for the future abounded, ranging from Marxian socialism to theories of social Darwinism. In 1888, American novelist Edward Bellamy published Looking Backward: 2000–1887, the story of a Bostonian who travels 113 years into a utopian future. Looking Backward became one of the most successful novels of the century. Michael Robertson writes in The Last Utopians,

The Last Utopians

the book initiated a vogue for utopian fiction that continued for the next twenty-five years. More English-language utopian works — over five hundred — were published in the quarter-century following the appearance of Bellamy’s novel than had appeared in the nearly four hundred years between More and Bellamy. (2018)

Responding to Bellamy’s depiction of the benefits of technological progress, William Morris published News from Nowhere (1890), a vision of pastoral England freed from industrial horrors. Meanwhile, Charlotte Perkins Gilman penned a series of utopian writings including Herland (1915), depicting an ideal society without men.

The horrors of the twentieth century significantly impacted utopian writing. The nightmarish possibilities of world wars, totalitarian regimes, and technological advancements colored visions of the future; the atrocities committed in the name of utopian visions undermined any depiction of an “ideal society.” While some works still attempted a utopian project — B. F. Skinner’s Walden Two (1948), Aldous Huxley’s Island (1962), Ernest Callenbach’s Ecotopia (1975) — the twentieth century quickly became rife with dystopias and anti-utopias. 

Sargent defines an intentional community — once called a utopian experiment — as “a group of five or more adults and their children, if any, who come from more than one nuclear family and who have chosen to live together to enhance their shared values or for some other mutually agreed upon purpose” (1994). The nineteenth century saw an increase in such communities as like-minded individuals attempted to create their own utopias by separating themselves from broader society and adopting shared values or goals. Brook Farm was one of the most famous of these experiments because of its connections to the transcendentalist movement in the US. It was founded by well-known Unitarian minister George Ripley and his wife, Sophia Ripley, and Nathaniel Hawthorne was a founding member. Another commonly cited American example is the Oneida Community, a Christian community founded in New York which practiced group marriage, communalism, and male sexual continence. Although these groups are associated with the nineteenth century, they continue to the present day in various forms, secular and religious. See Lucy Sargisson and Lyman Tower Sargent’s Living in Utopia: New Zealand's Intentional Communities (2004, [2016]) for more on these communities and New Zealand’s specific relevance in utopian history.

Sargent would argue that humanity’s first utopian impulses lie in myths of body utopias, free from political structures, but Jendrysik frames utopia differently:

Utopia begins with politics. Utopia might not end with politics, but the nature of political life, the distribution of power among individuals and in society, and the legitimacy of authority over the community lie at the heart of utopian thought. (2020)

This statement rings right for city utopias, intentional communities, and social/political theory, if not also for body utopias (is the dream of a paradise without politics itself a political dream?). 

Political theory has long sought to envision a vastly improved society. Plato’s Laws (c. 360 BCE) grapples with the difficulties of creating a constitution for a new colony. The Communist Manifesto (1848) envisions a better world and the next stage of human development. However, utopian theory — examining utopia as a concept rather than proposing a plan for a utopia — only began in the twentieth century. Karl Mannheim differentiated ideology from utopia. Both were mental constructs, “fictive activities,” but ideology maintained existing structures while utopias tended to “shatter, either partially or wholly, the order of things prevailing at the time” (Ideology and Utopia, 1936, [2000]).

Utopian thinker Ernst Bloch posits that a utopian impulse drives everything future-oriented in life and culture, “encompassing everything from games to patent medicines, from myths to mass entertainment, from iconography to technology, from architecture to eros, from tourism to jokes and the unconscious” (Jameson, 2007). 

Responding to Bloch’s theories, Fredric Jameson argues in Archaeologies of the Future that there are two lines of descent from More’s Utopia: “the one intent on the realization of the Utopian program, the other an obscure yet omnipresent Utopian impulse finding its way to the surface in a variety of covert expressions and practices” (2007). This first line is systemic; it encompasses revolutionary political practice, literary utopias, and intentional communities — Sargent’s three faces of utopia. The other line of descent is “more obscure and more various”:

Archaeologies of the Future

liberal reforms and commercial pipedreams, the deceptive yet tempting swindles of the here and now, where Utopia serves as the mere lure and bait for ideology [...]. Still, perhaps a few of the more obvious forms can be identified: political and social theory, for example, even when – especially when – it aims at realism and at the eschewal of everything Utopian; piecemeal social democratic and “liberal” reforms as well, when they are merely allegorical of a wholesale transformation of the social totality. (2007)

In short, Jameson sees two sides of utopia: self-conscious efforts toward a utopian form and an at times repressed or unconscious utopian impulse.

Hearing “dystopia,” we likely think of any number of popular narratives, from Suzanne Collins’ The Hunger Games (2008) to Westworld (Joy and Nolan, 2016–2022). Dystopias are everywhere, perhaps because our own reality is increasingly dystopian. But what does dystopia really mean? How does it relate to utopia and how do we tell the two apart?

While “utopia” contains two meanings, “dystopia” is deceptively simple, literally meaning “bad place.” If a utopia is a fictional world that is better than the one we live in now, a dystopia is one that is worse. 

But dystopia is not simply the opposite of utopia. Anti-utopia is sometimes offered as a synonym for dystopia, but Sargent differentiates these terms: an anti-utopia uses “the utopian form to attack either utopias in general or a specific utopia” (1994). Dystopias do not necessarily critique the utopian impulse, and several works responding to Bellamy, for example, critique his specific utopian vision without being dystopian.

Michael D. Gordin, Helen Tilley, and Gyan Prakash argue in Utopia/Dystopia: Conditions of Historical Possibility (2010),

Utopia/Dystopia

A true opposite of utopia would be a society that is either completely unplanned or is planned to be deliberately terrifying and awful. Dystopia, typically invoked, is neither of these things; rather, it is a utopia that has gone wrong, or a utopia that functions only for a particular segment of society.

Most utopias and dystopias begin with an impulse to create a better society. Of course, “there are many more ways [...] to generate dystopia than utopia”: “Every utopia always comes with its implied dystopia — whether the dystopia of the status quo, which the utopia is engineered to address, or a dystopia found in the way this specific utopia corrupts itself in practice” (Gordin, Tilley, and Prakash, 2010). It is fitting that the word dystopia only came into use to describe a type of literature in the mid-twentieth century, when utopian thinking itself was faltering.

Utopias have never been perfect. One generation’s utopia is often the next’s dystopia. In the regulation of artistic production in Plato’s ideal republic, or the harsh punishments for premarital sex and adultery in More’s Utopia, we see how a utopia for one can be a dystopia for another. Security can look like control, freedom like chaos. So how do we tell the difference between utopias and dystopias? 

Sargent points toward the author’s intentions as a deciding factor: did the writer intend for this society to be read as better or worse than the society they were living in? Of course, authorial intention is difficult to determine, and it can be at odds with the text itself. For example, H. G. Wells’ A Modern Utopia (1905) was intended to represent a genuinely ideal society. However, Wells’ World State embraces the hallmarks of many dystopian regimes like constant surveillance, control of sexual activity and marriage, and eugenics. To our eyes, and perhaps to the eyes of Wells’ contemporary readers, A Modern Utopia looks decidedly dystopian.

In Critical Theory and Dystopia (2022), Patricia McManus locates a difference between utopian and dystopian fiction on a narrative and formal level. Utopian fiction traditionally includes some sort of “explanatory framework” which allows the new world to be “inaugurated, peered over, understood” (McManus, 2022). More’s protagonist travels from contemporary England to an island; Bellamy’s protagonist time travels over a century into the future. Dystopia, on the other hand, “takes a much more narratively dangerous route”: it plunges the reader into a world which has long been “dystopian” and provides no outsider to “guide” the reader through the shift (McManus, 2022). The dystopian future is all there is, the past vague or lost altogether. The reader has “no textual present when she reads”: 

Critical Theory and Dystopia

she is addressed by the dystopian text as someone who is in this new world as it is experienced rather than experiencing it from the reports of fictional witnesses to whom it also might have come as a novel or shocking place. (McManus, 2022) 

With no outside perspective to provide commentary on the society we encounter, we must mirror the dystopian protagonist’s own journey of awakening: “Plot rather than pedagogy serves as the narrative backbone” (McManus, 2022).

Dystopias begin with habit or familiarization: for the dystopian inhabitant, the dreadful is just their daily routine. As the inhabitant realizes the nature of the dystopian regime and becomes estranged from their world, the reader is gradually given textual space to mirror their own estrangement from the dystopian regime. However, there is “never a textual space opened for the evaluation of the regime from the perspective of the present” (McManus, 2022). 

Dystopian fiction can also be identified by a number of recurring themes — forms of mass surveillance, restrictions on freedom of movement, state control of family structures/sexual activity/romantic relationships, forced conformity, government manipulation of historical records/the truth. Dystopian literature often explores feelings of alienation, identity loss, isolation, timelessness, and the benefits and dangers of freedom.

Classic examples of dystopian literature include Jack London’s The Iron Heel (1908), Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We (first published in English in 1924), Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932), George Orwell’s 1984 (1949), and Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 (1953). Ursula K. Le Guin’s writings exhibit dystopian, utopian, and critical utopian impulses; The Dispossessed (1974) bears the tagline and subtitle “an ambiguous utopia,” and her short story “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” (1973) depicts a society whose perfection relies on the perpetual misery of a single child. Margaret Atwood is famous for her dystopian fiction, such as the MaddAddam trilogy (2003–2013) and The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), while Lois Lowry’s The Giver (1993) and Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go (2005) depict more quietly sinister dystopias. (For more, you can explore our study guide on speculative fiction — a genre which encompasses both utopian and dystopian fiction.)

While utopias can critique current societies, dystopias provide a warning or rebuke to the present through a vision of the future that awaits us if we do not change. As Gordin, Tilley, and Prakash argue, dystopia “bears the aspect of lived experience”: 

Whereas utopia takes us into a future and serves to indict the present, dystopia places us directly in a dark and depressing reality, conjuring up a terrifying future if we do not recognize and treat its symptoms in the here and now. (2010)

Key differences between utopias and dystopias

To summarize, here are the key differences between utopias and dystopias:

Authorial intent: Writers of utopias intend to depict a society that appears better than the one we live in now, while writers of dystopia aim to imagine worlds that are worse. Dystopian writers often do this by drawing attention to or exaggerating flaws within our current society.

Narrative style: Utopias tend to employ a frame narrative involving a guide for the reader who travels in space or time to another society. Dystopias tend to begin with habit or familiarization, plunging the reader directly into the world and treating dystopian details as commonplace. The reader’s journey mirrors the dystopian inhabitant’s estrangement from their world.

Themes: Utopias emphasize hope, harmony, abundance, possibility, peace. Dystopias emphasize fear, isolation, surveillance, control, manipulation.

Dream vs. warning: Utopias imagine a better future, sometimes completely unlike the present. Dystopias respond to our current society and serve as cautionary lessons; dystopian authors present us with a future (or even a version of the present) that they believe we must change or work to avoid. 


Since dystopia’s rise and utopia’s fall in the wake of twentieth century horrors, our times seem increasingly anti-utopian. The climate crisis promises an end to the world as we know it. Technological advancements, such as the rise of AI, often elicit more horror than excitement. Even space seems not a promised paradise, but just another frontier for billionaires to conquer. 

When Francis Fukuyama declared “the end of history” in 1989, he proclaimed the utopia achieved: liberal democracy and capitalism represented the final stage of development. However, for scholars like Jameson and Mark Fisher, capitalism without end is the true dystopian nightmare, and it has become increasingly difficult to dream of a realistic alternative. 

Perhaps in defiance of its promised death, utopia is having a renaissance. Utopian and dystopian literature marketed toward young adults is flourishing, providing visions of the future in which young heroes overthrow oppressive regimes. The utopian dream is not yet dead for the younger generations. 

Meanwhile, Zygmunt Bauman identifies nostalgia as a key feature in contemporary utopias. In Retrotopia (2017), he describes the proliferation of utopian “visions located in the lost/stolen/abandoned but undead past”:

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