Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction: Tracing the Modern Gothic
- 1 The Strangely Mingled Monster: Gothic Invasions, Occupations, and Outgrowths in Fin de Siècle London
- 2 The Old Subconscious Trail of Dread: Shadows, Animism, and Re-Emergence in the Rural World
- 3 In the Black Ruins of the Frenzied Night: Spectral Encounters in Wartime and Postwar London
- 4 From the Waste Land to the Dark Tower: Revitalizing the Rural Gothic in the Interwar Period
- Conclusion: Afterlives and Revenants of Gothic Modernity
- Notes
- Index
4 - From the Waste Land to the Dark Tower: Revitalizing the Rural Gothic in the Interwar Period
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction: Tracing the Modern Gothic
- 1 The Strangely Mingled Monster: Gothic Invasions, Occupations, and Outgrowths in Fin de Siècle London
- 2 The Old Subconscious Trail of Dread: Shadows, Animism, and Re-Emergence in the Rural World
- 3 In the Black Ruins of the Frenzied Night: Spectral Encounters in Wartime and Postwar London
- 4 From the Waste Land to the Dark Tower: Revitalizing the Rural Gothic in the Interwar Period
- Conclusion: Afterlives and Revenants of Gothic Modernity
- Notes
- Index
Summary
Suddenly I saw a clearing in the dark drive ahead, and a patch of sky, and in a moment the dark trees had thinned, the nameless shrubs had disappeared, and on either side of us was a wall of colour, blood-red, reaching far above our heads. We were amongst the rhododendrons. There was something bewildering, even shocking, about the suddenness of their discovery. The woods had not prepared me for them.
—Daphne du Maurier, RebeccaThe evolution of the urban Gothic in the interwar period runs alongside a contemporaneous development of the rural British Gothic, and to some extent these are interrelated. The greater emphasis upon tension and conflict within domestic environments, for example, is evident in both rural and metropolitan settings; or, in the case of Bowen's stories, in those between-spaces, urban–rural edgelands, which can be said to occupy both categories. This final chapter will thus begin by examining the relation of such stories to the established tropes and settings of the rural Gothic, noting that in authors such as Bowen, Blackwood, and Benson we see an evolution of the typical haunted house tale: here, contemporary anxieties relating to class, identity, and values are expressed through ambiguous and fluctuating domestic environments. The trauma of the First World War, which led to the sense of a haunted and attenuated metropolitan world examined in the previous chapter, also marks these spaces; but for authors such as Mary Butts, the rural realm additionally posits the possibility of renewal and revitalization, new aesthetics and values that are linked to a Gothicized understanding of the British countryside, to fantastical imagery and atmospheres, and particularly to pagan history and mythology. This fascination with paganism, which often overlaps with the Gothic but is also linked to romanticism and the sublime, is similarly evident in the work of Lawrence, Blackwood, Sylvia Townsend Warner, and Mary Webb. If London becomes a less cosmopolitan, more restrictive space in some interwar texts, then the rural often replaces it as a Gothic centre of energy, either attracting or haunting urban dwellers, and thus reversing the centripetal metropolitan movements seen in texts such as Dracula. For Townsend Warner and Webb, rural England can simultaneously be a site associated with superstition, Satanism, and witchcraft, and a place of modernity, insofar as it offers their female protagonists the potential for education and emancipation.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Locating the Gothic in British Modernity , pp. 153 - 198Publisher: Liverpool University PressPrint publication year: 2019