'No spoilers, please': the crux of illustrating the explained Gothic without explaining the mystery

Susanne Schwertfeger ()
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Susanne Schwertfeger: Christian-Albrechts-Universität

Palgrave Communications, 2017, vol. 3, issue 1, 1-9

Abstract: Abstract Besides the story itself, illustrations add an extra layer to how a text is perceived. As related to the Gothic novel, this visual attribute and its specific issues have been hardly addressed. This article focuses on a special aspect of the complicated relationship between the literary and the visual Gothic. How can the Gothic atmosphere be translated from the experience of reading (as an establishing and successive act) into an experience of viewing (which, in the case of these illustrations, is not consecutive but almost isolated and selective)? The article concentrates on a certain dilemma that especially occurs for those stories that can be labeled as explained Gothic, in which no actual ghosts or demons haunt the scene, but banditti or other quite human villains do. The characters in the diegesis as well as the readers were for most of the story unaware of the true nature of the described phenomenon. Therefore, how could this phenomenon be visualized to generate interest (as a selling point) and somehow stay true to the source without giving away the ending at the same time? First, this article offers close readings of various illustrations for Ann Radcliffe’s Gothic Novel The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), in which the artists had to struggle with the depiction of the most famous episode of Emily St. Aubert’s attempts to lift the infamous black veil. It identifies three opposing strategies of how this predicament was solved. The aesthetic of reception is used to further analyze those approaches. The article then argues that the strategies are distinguished by the handling of the mystery and understanding of the concept of the explained Gothic in general. Finally, it reconstructs the assumed readership for those different editions and their preferences of the visual Gothic.

Date: 2017
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DOI: 10.1057/s41599-017-0018-z

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