Lindsay LaRoche
Dr. Ruth Benander
World Literature
25 February 2013
Early Gothic Versus “The Outsider”
The Gothic is a genre that is not easily defined. It shares many qualities with others like horror and science fiction; however, it is recognizable in its own sense through the use of similar literary tropes. These tropes vary from the oppression of women by men, oppression by the church, forbidden love, fear of the weather, fear of science, supernatural events, and transgression, among others. The use of these tropes takes the genre away from being a scary story because scary things are happening, to invoking fear because of things out of one’s control, or because of the unknown.
The atmosphere of a Gothic story is a way that the author is able to bring out fear in the reader. Strong imagery depicting eerie settings of decaying castles in the dark, help to reinforce uneasiness about the story. In the early Gothic, lightening and loud thunder were primary ways to frighten readers. This is because weather was frightening for those living in the 18th and 19th centuries due to there not being a clear explanation for it yet. As time went on, different fears began to emerge. This change is evident through Gothic literature as the tropes became relevant to the fears of the times. Walpole’s 18th century The Castle of Otranto focused much of its attention to the fears of the unknown in the ways of destiny, distrust of others, and forbidden love. The 19th century was able to take these same fears and attribute them to particular causes that were still not fully explained yet. For example, Poe’s The Fall of the House of Usher and well as Perkin’s The Yellow Wallpaper showed how one’s personal insanity can lead to unusual occurrences. While these tropes have been borrowed later on, Hogle argues that even the name Gothic is borrowed. He writes “Even the term “Gothic” itself is a counterfeit by this standard. As a term that has already been separated from an early-medieval race of Europeans and connected later by critics to a pointed-arch building style entirely unrelated to the Goths” (165). This shows how ideas are constantly being reused. This can be seen in the Gothic genre itself from century to century. No matter what, a character in a Gothic story is put into a situation where they are being oppressed and they must transgress in order to escape it.
Lovecraft’s 1926 story, “The Outsider” puts a new, 20th century spin on the traditional Gothic. He uses traditional Gothic tropes but makes it so that the monster is actually the main character. This character has lived a life of oppression by being shut in a castle by himself for years with no memories of human contact. He spends his days reading books that have been left in the castle and they are his only glimpse into the outside world. He transgresses by escaping the castle, or rather his oppressor, and finally sees what he has felt he has been missing out on. In this story, Lovecraft shows that marginalization is inevitable regardless of how much a person wants to be normal. Even when a marginalized person is offered access to the normal world, his self-identification as an outsider acts as a barrier to achieving normalcy.
Baldick writes about how the castle helps to set the scene for Gothic stories by saying “For the Gothic effect to be attained, a tale should combine a fearful sense of inheritance in time with a claustrophobic sense of enclosure in space, these two dimensions reinforcing one another to produce an impression of sickening descent into disintegration” (xix). This way of frightening the reader from the beginning with the setting is used by Lovecraft at the beginning of the story. He describes the castle in which the main character resides by saying “the castle was infinitely old and infinitely horrible, full of dark passages and having high ceilings… The stones in the crumbling corridors seemed hideously damp, and there was an accursed smell everywhere, as of the piled-up corpses of dead generations” (316). The main character of the story has been stuck in this uncomfortable environment for his whole life, never having seen the light of day nor having human contact. This is the claustrophobic sense that Baldick talks about that leads to the sickening descent. Even though he would “longingly picture myself amidst gay crowds in the sunny world” (Lovecraft 317), the way that the main character has grown up sets him apart from anyone else he would come in contact with.
After being confined for so long in the dark and silence he decides to escape. He finally reaches the top where he sees the moon for the first time and is stunned. Lovecraft foreshadows what is to come by writing, “I neither knew nor cared whether my experience was insanity, dreaming, or magic… I knew not who I was or what I was, or what my surroundings might be” (319). He comes upon a social gathering at another castle and upon entering, horrifies everyone in the room. However, he does not know that they are afraid of him until he realizes that the “unholy abomination” that stands before him, is in fact the image of himself in a mirror. Lovecraft hints at the main character being a supernatural being by writing “when in one cataclysmic second of cosmic nightmarishness and hellish accident my fingers touched the rotting outstretched paw of the monster beneath the golden arch” (320). In having a paw, the main character is made out to be abhuman. Cameron writes “The most sublime moments of Gothic fiction occur when something that should have remained in the past, something that should have remained dead and buried, has returned in the present, creating disequilibrium” (19). When the main character leaves his environment and enters the foreign one, it causes disequilibrium. As much as he wanted to join the people and have interactions for the first time, he could not because he was different. He realized that he did not look like the people in the books he read, nor the people at the gathering. In the end, the main character realized that “The moon is not for me… I know always that I am an outsider; a stranger” (Lovecraft 321). This ending shows that he accepts that he is who he is, and that his status as an outsider is a barrier to achieving the normalcy that he originally desired. He has to learn to accept the way that he is and not try to find acceptance where he is not welcome.
This short story was originally published in the Horror fiction magazine Weird Tales. While it does contain elements that make it appear Horror, its inclusion of traditional Gothic tropes allows it to be considered part of the Gothic genre. A Horror story may take place in a decrepit building in the dark with strange sounds, but it is not psychological like the Gothic is. In a horror story, it is almost always obvious who the good and the bad guys are. A Gothic story is not always as clear about what the reader should believe, and the ending is not as black and white as a horror story ending. Yes, the people in the other castle are horrified by the appearance of the main character; however, the reader feels sympathy for him. Because of this, the reader does not know whether he is a monster or just an ostracized human being. If the story were of the Horror genre, the main character would have been recognized as a monster right away and done more in the way of harm to the people of the other castle instead of just frightening them. The psychological reaction of the main character discovering that he is a monster is an important aspect of the Gothic because it shows how one cannot change his own destiny. He is to be forever deemed as an outsider.
Lovecraft’s “The Outsider” is considered to be of the Gothic genre because of the similar tropes that it shares with other Gothic stories. However, he is able to add an interesting new twist of having the monster be the main character and go through the traditional transgression. With the 20th century introducing so many new ideas and ways of doing things, came new fears. The world was changing at a pace that was complicated and hard to understand for people that they felt a fear of belonging. This is not something that was seen in the 18th and 19th centuries because then, the roles of people were generally the same as they had been for a while. However, this sudden and rapid change relates back to the traditional fear of the unknown. Lovecraft wrote this story to show that what is new and different is not always bad. Even though by the end of the story, the reader realizes the main character is in fact a monster, they accept him because they understand the struggles that he has faced and sympathize for him. Through the main character the reader learns that marginalization is inevitable regardless of how much the person desires to be normal. Because of this, people must accept themselves for who they are as well as accept others despite their differences.
Works Cited
Baldick, Chris. “Introduction.” The Oxford Book of Gothic Tales. Ed. Chris Baldick. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. ix-xiii. Print.
Cameron, Ed. “Ironic Escapism in the Symbolic Spread of Gothic Materialist Meaning.” Gothic Studies 10.2 (2008) : 18-34. Print.
Hogle, Jerrold E. “Hyper-Reality and the Gothic Affect: The Sublimation of Fear from Burke to Walpole to ‘The Ring’.” English Language Notes 48.1 (2010) : 163-176. Print.
Lovecraft, H.P. “The Outsider” The Oxford Book of Gothic Tales. Ed. Chris Baldick. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. 316-321. Print.
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