Domesticity
"Through what is called behavior or good manners we are supposed to achieve what is otherwise achievable only through violence, or perhaps not even through violence."
Goethe, The Elective Affinities
What is the role of "good manners" in Cranford? What about gossip? What's the relationship between the two?
The Gothic
"You know the important features of its mise en scene: an oppressive man, a wild landscape, a Catholic or feudal society. You know about the trembling sensibility of the heroine and the impetuosity of her lover. You know about the tyrannical older man with the piercing glance who is going to imprison and try to rape or murder them. You know something about the novel's form: it is likely to be discontinuous and involuted, perhaps incorporating tales within tales, changes of narrators, and such framing devices as found manuscripts or interpolated histories. You also know that, whether with more or less relevance to the main plot, certain characteristic preoccupations will be aired. These include the priesthood and monastic institutions; sleeplike and deathlike states; subterranean spaces and live burial; doubles; the discovery of obscured family ties; affinities between narrative and pictorial art; possibilities of incest; unnatural echoes or silences; unintelligible writings, and the unspeakable; garrulous retainers; the poisonous effects of guilt and shame; nocturnal landscapes and dreams; apparitions from the past; Faust- and the Wandering Jew-like figures; civil insurrections and fires; the charnel house and the madhouse."
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, The Coherence of Gothic Conventions
"[Gothic novels are] the necessary fruits of the revolutionary tremors felt by the whole of Europe."
Marquis de Sade, 1800
A few high points in the Gothic tradition:
Horace Walpole, The Castle of Otranto (1764): the first Gothic novel
Ann Radcliffe, The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794): the Gothic becomes a huge success and thus begins the "female addiction to reading"; Radcliffe utilizes "the explained supernatural" to great effect
Matthew Gregory "Monk" Lewis, The Monk (1796): a book that Lord Byron, no saint himself, called "the work of a jaded voluptuary"; Lewis was 19 when he wrote this novel
Charles Brockden Brown, Wieland (1798): the Gothic arrives in America
Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey(1800, 1818): delightful parody of Gothic novels
Charles Robert Maturin, Melmoth the Wanderer (1820): the decadent end of the Gothic novel, as recognized by literary historians.
The tradition continues to this day, even if the Gothic novel proper ended almost 200 years ago. Elements of the Gothic have found their way into writing by, among others, the Bronte sisters, Charles Dickens, William Faulkner, Flannery O'Connor, Toni Morrison, Anne Rice, and Stephen King. One literary critic has gone so far as to argue that all American writing is Gothic.
Horror
In general, horror is considered a subgenre of the Gothic, characterized by the following: gruesome effects, uncanny events, monstrous beings, obsessive introspection; its evil must be plausible, physically and morally threatening, and impure or unclean. The conventions of horror assume that there is a natural order to be violated, resulting in corruption, decay, dismemberment, psychological dislocation, defilement, unholy hybrids, and general disorder.
"The Horror Novel," Encyclopedia of the Novel
Seven Main Branches of Horror
1. "animal drives which threaten man"
2. "immortal parasite"
3. "witches, corrupt humans who worship evil"
4. "resurrected dead, or possessed beings who are figuratively dead"
5. "unpredictable madmen"
6. "mad scientist and created monster"
7. "creatures from outer space, inside the earth, or from the id"
Stuart M. Kaminsky, American Film Genres
Horror's Degrees of Revelation:
1. Terror of unknown but implied evil
2. Horror of glimpsed evil
3. Disgust for explicitly displayed evil
Stephen King, Danse Macabre