The first Gothic fiction appeared with works like Horace Walpole’s Castle of Otranto (1765) and Matthew Gregory Lewis’ Monk (1796), which countered 18th-century “rationalism” with scenes of mystery, horror, and wonder. Gothic (the spelling “Gothick” better conveys the contemporary flavour) was a designation derived from architecture, and it carried—in opposition to the Italianate style of neoclassical building more appropriate to the Augustan Age—connotations of rough and primitive grandeur. The atmosphere of a Gothic novel was expected to be dark, tempestuous, ghostly, full of madness, outrage, superstition, and the spirit of revenge. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, which maintains its original popularity and even notoriety, has in overplus the traditional Gothic ingredients, with its weird God-defying experiments, its eldritch shrieks, and, above all, its monster. Edgar Allan Poe developed the Gothic style brilliantly in the United States, and he has been a considerable influence. A good deal of early science fiction, like H.G. Wells’s Island of Doctor Moreau (1896), seems to spring out of the Gothic movement, and the Gothic atmosphere has been seriously cultivated in England in the later novels of Iris Murdoch and in the Gormenghast sequence beginning in 1946 of Mervyn Peake. It is noteworthy that Gothic fiction has always been approached in a spirit of deliberate suspension of the normal canons of taste. Like a circus trick, a piece of Gothic fiction asks to be considered as ingenious entertainment; the pity and terror are not aspects of a cathartic process but transient emotions to be, somewhat perversely, enjoyed for their own sake. Psychological
The psychological novel first appeared in 17th-century France, with Madame de La Fayette’s Princesse de Clèves (1678), and the category was consolidated by works like the Abbé Prévost’s Manon Lescaut (1731) in the century following. More primitive fiction had been characterized by a proliferation of action and incidental characters; the psychological novel limited itself to a few characters whose motives for action could be examined and analyzed. In England, the psychological novel did not appear until the Victorian era, when George Eliot became its first great exponent. It has been assumed since then that the serious novelist’s prime concern is the workings of the human mind, and hence much of the greatest fiction must be termed psychological. Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment deals less with the ethical significance of a murder than with the soul of the murderer; Flaubert’s interest in Emma Bovary has less to do with the consequences of her mode of life in terms of nemesic logic than with the patterns of her mind; in Anna Karenina, Tolstoy presents a large-scale obsessive study of feminine psychology that is almost excruciating in its relentless probing. The novels of Henry James are psychological in that the crucial events occur in the souls of the protagonists, and it was perhaps James more than any serious novelist before or since who convinced frivolous novel-readers that the “psychological approach” guarantees a lack of action and excitement.
The theories of Sigmund Freud are credited as the source of the psychoanalytical novel. Freud was anticipated, however, by Shakespeare (in, for example, his treatment of Lady Macbeth’s somnambulistic guilt). Two 20th-century novelists of great psychological insight—Joyce and Nabokov—professed a disdain for Freud. To write a novel with close attention to the Freudian or Jungian techniques of analysis does not necessarily produce new prodigies of psychological revelation; Oedipus and Electra complexes have become commonplaces of superficial novels and films. The great disclosures about human motivation have been achieved more by the intuition and introspection of novelists and dramatists than by the more systematic work of the clinicians. The novel of manners
To make fiction out of the observation of social behaviour is sometimes regarded as less worthy than to produce novels that excavate the human mind. And yet the social gestures known as manners, however superficial they appear to be, are indices of a collective soul and merit the close attention of the novelist and reader alike. The works of Jane Austen concern themselves almost exclusively with the social surface of a fairly narrow world, and yet she has never been accused of a lack of profundity. A society in which behaviour is codified, language restricted to impersonal formulas, and the expression of feeling muted, is the province of the novel of manners, and such fiction may be produced as readily in the 20th century as in the era of Fanny Burney or Jane Austen. Such novels as Evelyn Waugh’s Handful of Dust (1934) depend on the exact notation of the manners of a closed society, and personal tragedies are a mere temporary disturbance of collective order. Even Waugh’s trilogy Sword of Honour is as much concerned with the minutiae of surface behaviour in an army, a very closed society, as with the causes for which that army fights. H.H. Munro (“Saki”), in The Unbearable Bassington (1912), an exquisite novel of manners, says more of the nature of Edwardian society than many a more earnest work. It is conceivable that one of the novelist’s duties to posterity is to inform it of the surface quality of the society that produced him; the great psychological profundities are eternal, manners are ephemeral and have to be caught. Finally, the novel of manners may be taken as an artistic symbol of a social order that feels itself to be secure. Epistolary
The novels of Samuel Richardson arose out of his pedagogic vocation, which arose out of his trade of printer—the compilation of manuals of letter-writing technique for young ladies. His age regarded letter writing as an art on which could be expended the literary care appropriate to the essay or to fiction, and, for Richardson, the creation of epistolary novels entailed a mere step from the actual world into that of the imagination. His Pamela (1740) and Clarissa (1748) won phenomenal success and were imitated all over Europe, and the epistolary novel—with its free outpouring of the heart—was an aspect of early romanticism. In the 19th century, when the letter-writing art had not yet fallen into desuetude, it was possible for Wilkie Collins to tell the mystery story of The Moonstone (1868) in the form of an exchange of letters, but it would be hard to conceive of a detective novel using such a device in the 20th century, when the well-wrought letter is considered artificial. Attempts to revive the form have not been successful, and Christopher Isherwood’s Meeting by the River (1967), which has a profoundly serious theme of religious conversion, seems to fail because of the excessive informality and chattiness of the letters in which the story is told. The 20th century’s substitute for the long letter is the transcribed tape recording—more, as Beckett’s play Krapp’s Last Tape indicates, a device for expressing alienation than a tool of dialectic. But it shares with the Richardsonian epistle the power of seeming to grant direct communication with a fictional character, with no apparent intervention on the part of the true author. Pastoral
Fiction that presents rural life as an idyllic condition, with exquisitely clean shepherdesses and sheep immune to foot-rot, is of very ancient descent. Longus’ Daphnis and Chloe, written in Greek in the 2nd or 3rd century ce, was the remote progenitor of such Elizabethan pastoral romances as Sir Philip Sidney’s Arcadia (1590) and Thomas Lodge’s Rosalynde (1590), the source book for Shakespeare’s As You Like It. The Paul et Virginie of Bernardin de St. Pierre (1787), which was immensely popular in its day, seems to spring less from the pastoral utopian convention than from the dawning Romanticism that saw in a state of nature only goodness and innocence. Still, the image of a rural Eden is a persistent one in Western culture, whatever the philosophy behind it, and there are elements of this vision even in D.H. Lawrence’s Rainbow (1915) and, however improbable this may seem, in his Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928). The more realistic and ironic pictures of the pastoral life, with poverty and pig dung, beginning with George Crabbe’s late-18th-century narrative poems, continuing in George Eliot, reaching sour fruition in Thomas Hardy, are usually the work of people who know the country well, while the rural idyll is properly a townsman’s dream. The increasing stresses of urban life make the country vision a theme still available to serious fiction, as even a work as sophisticated as Saul Bellow’s Herzog (1964) seems to show. But, since Stella Gibbons’ satire Cold Comfort Farm (1932), it has been difficult for any British novelist to take seriously pastoral lyricism. Apprenticeship