Wordsworth And The Gothic Style

Wordsworth’s hostility to the Gothic is beyond doubt.No one who has read the1800 Preface to Lyrical Ballads can doubt the apparent weight of his aversion.Yet Wordsworth’s attack is complicated by the fact that he himself had something of a gothic penchant.The classic account of the poet’s relation to the Gothic is that after an early infatuation,Wordsworth turned decisively against the Gothic and embraced Nature.However,a close examination reveals that Wordsworth abandoned his youthful taste of the pure Gothic,which relies heavily on the terrific scenes,and came to shape his own Gothic mode: the exploration of psychological turmoil of people under extreme incidents.This thesis conducts a study of the Gothic elements in his poems,with the aim to suggest novel connections between,and to bring together into a constructive dialogue,the two literary forms that are still to a large extent mutually distinct on the surface,yet profoundly linked in essence,in today’s academic discourse.The thesis provides the necessary background concerning the Gothic in the last decade of the eighteenth century and the poet’s rearrangement of the second edition Lyrical Ballads with the aim to show that the 1800 Preface is more of a strategic retreat.On this basis the thesis offers novel readings of selected writings to trace the specific employment of the Gothic in his corpus from three perspectives: its influence on the reader,the typical Gothic characters,and the common Gothic structures.Then this thesis puts the Gothic poems of Wordsworth into the context of his complete works,and draws the conclusion that the Gothic presence in Wordsworth’s complete works proves his inheritance and subversion of the Gothic.Dissatisfied with the vulgarity of the Gothic materials,he makes an elevation of this “low” form of art to a state of “higher mind.” Meanwhile the unbound practice of the Imagination in the Gothic,what he refers to as “poetic probability,” is also adopted by him to explore the psychological nuances of humanity.By the investigation of the Gothic elements in his works,we find out that the more optimistic parts of Wordsworth’s poetry and philosophy do not necessarily function as such when considered alongside the more pessimistic and disharmonious parts that disrupt this sense of affirmation.