Capturing Gothic

Though from the start the tale of Frankenstein does not appear to hold all too many elements that most people would credit the Gothic genre with, it very quickly picks up the slack and provides elements that modern day readers will be able to connect with the image if the Gothic. This is of course not to say that the first few chapters do not fit the criteria of Gothic literature, on the contrary, the first few chapter provide a lot of Gothic undertones, implications of incestuous relations being one, and the characterization of Victor being the other one of major note. Victor describing himself as someone not like the rest, he isolates himself from the majority of his peers. His academic interests in that what had been debunked and proven false drives him for much of his early life, and reinforces itself into his personality as an adult. His mothers death further adds to the misfortune of his life. Through out this narrative he constantly reiterates that the events of his early life set the course for his destiny. A force that is forever looming in the Gothic genre, that of predestination and necessity of events(often horrid), to occur.

And yet despite all of this the first true sense of the Gothic that I received was in the pages leading up to Chapter 5, as well as the very first paragraph which perfectly captures the image most have of the Gothic genre. The word choice that precedes chapter 5 does an excellent job of building tension, and creating a sense of anxiety that was not felt prior in the book, however opening with “It was on a dreary night of November…” is what I feel like captures the tone of the genre. In a sense this is echoed later by Poe in the opening of his poem “The Raven” which opens with “Once upon a midnight dreary…”