Gothic Imagination: Gothic Landscapes

This is the fourth in a series of talks I delivered as part of my undergraduate art history module Gothic Imagination. The script has been edited for publication here. As published, Gothic Imagination consists of five talks, accompanied by select presentation slides; slide images have been compressed and animations have been removed.

The talks were designed to be presented in the following sequence. Seminars, being unscripted and interactive, have been omitted.

1. Gothic Associations
   • Seminar—Heritage, Heresy and the Canon
2. Gothic Identities
   • Seminar—Politics, Terror and the Other
3. Gothic Bodies
   • Seminar—Science, Creation and the Unnatural
4. Gothic Landscapes
   • Seminar—Nature, Catastrophe and the Sublime
5. Gothic Visions
   • Seminar—Civilisation, Ruin and the Haunted

Gothic Imagination: Gothic Landscapes

In previous sessions, we looked at representations of the human form in relation to the gothic. We distinguished between “horror” and “terror,” between momentary disgust and lingering fear. And we asked: what makes a body gothic? Or, what are gothic qualities that make some critics, art historians and theorists label certain representations of the human body “gothic”? In response to that question, we considered terms and theoretical constructs such as the abject, the sublime, and the uncanny.

The question this session raises, predictably, is: What makes a landscape “gothic”?  If every object or product of visual culture that is uncanny or sublime is also “gothic,” then how does “gothic” help us better to define “uncanny” or “sublime”? Do we need “gothic” if “sublime” or “uncanny” will do? What does the term “gothic” add that cannot be equally well defined and described using words like “uncanny” and “sublime”? Might terms like “uncanny” and “sublime” just about cover the “gothic” if understood modally?

When examining bodies in relation to the gothic, we used as a point of reference three works of genre Gothic fiction whose central characters are generally considered to be the poster children of the Gothic. Jekyll and his alter ego Hyde. Count Dracula, undead, and capable of shifting shape.

I encouraged you, in your engagement with the visual gothic, to distinguish between bodies and characters. I suggested—and this is my attempt at meaningfully adapting the term ‘gothic’ for interpretations of visual culture—that hybridity multiplicity and mutability are essential to our appreciation of bodies as gothic rather than simply as “other.”

Literary characters and their characteristics can be translated into visuals beyond the narratives they were designed to inhabit. That is, visual artists can reference them—as Douglas Gordon references Jekyll and Hyde in Monster (1995)—without adapting particular passages from a narrative. The modally gothic is a communicable dis-ease.

As we have seen, the visual gothic need not be translations of—or illustrations for—the literary Gothic. Not all works that are now seen as part of the visual gothic—beyond architecture and design—are derived from genre Gothic fiction. Artists like Fuseli developed a visual language and an image repertoire that, in turn, influenced the literary gothic. And that would be drawn on by filmmakers when adapting gothic fictions for the screen.

It may be difficult for us to see paintings like Fuseli’s as gothic because, even though they were contemporary with the origins of Gothic as a literary genre, they were not themselves part of a genre or movement, and are therefore not generally referred to as “gothic” in the context of art history.

Even at the height of the literary Gothic in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the gothic was not a visual arts genre. Aside from the physical attributes that render the incubus horrific, The Nightmare attempts to create—or recreate—an episode of terror. It is an evolving story of corruption.

But does the gothic quality of The Nightmare derive mainly from its figures or from its narrative? Is not the gothic also lyrical—a gothic of atmosphere, of aura and mood?

If you google “gothic landscape art,” you will encounter stereotypical examples similar to those associated with the Gothic in general. Christian places of worship set in dark woods. Or just dark woods. Or just about any dark exterior. “Darkness” was the word that appeared most often in your own initial responses to the word “gothic” at the beginning of the semester.

The imaging of the gothic has not changed substantially over the years. Rather than starting out with an established inventory with which to define—and in which to confine—”gothic landscapes,” I encourage you to define “gothic” beyond stock visual elements such as  castles, and sacred architecture, and ruins and mountains and forests and thunderstorms and dark and stormy nights.

A checklist approach to the Gothic means to deny the gothic its modal potentialities. Inventories are more appropriate for a discussion of genres and for the classification of cultural products according to types. The gothic mode transcends those boundaries and invites us to question them.

But, by all means, let us look at the typical. One item in the Gothic inventory is the graveyard. That is where nefarious scientists find parts for their humanoid creations. It is where bodies are interred only to resurface as proverbial skeletons in closets. It is where the past refuses to be put to rest and instead continues to haunt the present. It is a good plot of land to start talking about gothic landscapes.

The graveyard is a gothic haunt. A haunt being a favourite place, a site frequented by those who contemplate the past and reflect on life, death and afterlife—and by those who contemplate the gothic.

After all, the literary Gothic is a descendant of the so-called Graveyard School, pre-Romantic poetry, mostly written in the first half of the seventeenth-century, that is distinguished by its preoccupation with the burial grounds, the tombstones and mausoleums we erect in honour of the dead.

When exploring the visual and modal gothic, it is difficult to get away from genre Gothic literature. But the graveyard school poems are not like Gothic novels. They create a mood rather than tell a story.

Thomas Parnell’s “Night-Piece on Death” (1722), is widely considered to be the initiator of the Graveyard School. Appropriately, the poem was published posthumously. Other examples include Robert Blair’s The Grave (1743); Edward Young’s Night Thoughts (1742–45); and Thomas Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Church Yard” (1751)

A 2023 anthology of such poems features Philosopher in a Moonlit Churchyard, a painting that was produced when the Romantics revisited the “Graveyard School,” as William Blake did, in 1797, for this illustration of Robert Blair’s 1743 poem The Grave. To give you a flavor of the School, here is an excerpt from “Edward Young’s Night Thoughts:

Whilst some affect the sun, and some the shade, / Some flee the city, some the hermitage; / Their aims as various as the roads they take / In journeying through life; the task be mine / To paint the gloomy horrors of the tomb; /Th’ appointed place of rendezvous, where all / These trav’llers meet.  Thy succours I implore, / Eternal King! whose potent arm sustains / The keys of hell and death. The Grave, dread thing! How populous, how vital is the grave! / This is creation’s melancholy vault, / The vale funereal, the sad cypress gloom / The land of apparitions, empty shades! / All, all on Earth is shadow, all beyond / Is substance; the reverse is Folly’s creed: / How solid all, where change shall be no more!

Today, books are devoted to demonstrating that photographs of graveyards are “gothic.” Not that you would find Jeff Wall’s Boys Cutting Through a Hedge (2003) in such a volume.

We looked at this photograph in the context of gothic identities, when we examined it in relation to the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center, to the aftermath of which this photograph responds. Wall’s photograph shows a Christian burial site invaded by what appear to be non-Christians.

It is not rendered atmospherically gothic through the manipulation of colour or the use of chiaroscuro. Rather, it tells—or retells—a story that, on close inspection, turns out to be a rooted in fear and suspicion, a narrative haunted by the memory of an act of terror, of terrorism.

That conflict between observation and recall, between fact and belief, makes the photograph a candidate for the gothic with a lower case G. It is a visualization of US American anxieties toward otherness—and the religious other—in the wake of September 11th.

The location is not simply a backdrop for the action. Without the location—and our realization of its sacredness—the gothic moment could not unfold. Nonetheless, that gothic scene depends on the characters and our assumptions as to their action.

A dead bird in a lifeless field may be a messenger of death—but what is gothic about Winter Fields (1942) by Andrew Wyeth, whose Christina’s World we have looked at previously, is not the certainty of death but the uncertainty of life—the fear and suspicion that the future is not going to be any brighter, that spring may never come. This painting, after all, was created in the United States in midst of the Second World War— at a stage when no victory over fascism was in sight.

We are going to revisit McGrath’s quotation—and death in relation to decay—in my final presentation, “Gothic Visions.” But it is useful to compare it to Young’s Night Thoughts, which we looked at earlier, and its assertion that “all on earth is shadow,” whereas death is “solid,” as “change shall be no more!”

Let us return for a moment to my Google search for images related to “gothic landscape.” If you add the word “museum” to the phrase “gothic landscape,” the examples become somewhat more complex, with Gothic Landscape (1961) by Lee Krasner thrown into the mix. But that is no less literary, or obvious, as the search result merely contains objects that are already labeled “gothic.”

That, too, has not changed in recent years, despite the growing number of books on the Gothic, including texts on the visual gothic.

As we have seen, Jackson Pollock’s widow, Lee Krasner, expressed her feelings about the death of Pollock in this “landscape,” which is a response to her dead husband’s painting Gothic (1944), a painting that was given its title by the critic Clement Greenberg.

That was our first encounter with gothic landscapes in this module—and it breaks away from the stereotypes of “gothic” in many images you find conducting a Google search using “Gothic landscape” as keywords.

Krasner’s Gothic Landscape offers one way out of the graveyard that is the inventory of the Gothic. But it also gets rather too far away, too soon, from traditional landscapes.

Coming from a literary background and having studied Gothic literature as part of my PhD, I struggled with the notion of landscape art being ‘gothic’ much more than with bodies as gothic sites.

Again, I can think of many alternative terms for gothic—ranging from gloomy and undomesticated to sublime. Is every sublime landscape a gothic landscape?

Friedrich’s Wanderer above a Sea of Fog (1818) made it onto the cover of the Dover Thrift edition of Frankenstein. It is a sublime painting.  But is it a gothic image? The scene is awe-inspiring rather than awful. This is not an image of overpowering fear but of fearlessness or fear conquered through belief.

This wanderer may have risen above the fog. But a gothic reading of this certifiably sublime painting may nonetheless make us doubt whether this is our proper place. That a rise above the fog of doubt may be hubris, or even a descent into madness.

The Bard (c. 1817) by John Martin also made it onto the cover of a paperback edition of an eighteenth-century Gothic novel by Ann Radcliffe, a popular Gothic novelist of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in Britain, some of whose novels predate Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein by more than a quarter century. The image is ripped out of its cultural and national context, a Welsh story now “decorating” a story set in Scotland.

That said, it thematically corresponds closely to the gothic in its depiction of oppression and injustice, power and powerlessness, of a clash of belief systems, and its exploration of England’s dark past as a coloniser of Wales, set in wild, untamed scenery representing a mythical and othered wild west of England.

We don’t need to go in search of Romantic paintings with which to illustrate Gothic novels. Gothic novels like Radcliffe’s are rich in landscape imagery. This is an excerpt from The Romance of the Forest (1791). Pay attention to the vocabulary:

“[T]he gloomy grandeur of the scenes which had so lately awakened emotions of delightful sublimity, now awed [Adeline] into terror; she trembled at the sound of the torrents rolling among the cliffs and thundering in the vale below, and shrunk from the view of the precipices, which sometimes overhung the road, and at others appeared beneath it.”

Here is another passage, this one from Radcliffe’s most famous work of genre gothic fiction, The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794):

“The solitary grandeur of [. . .] the mountain-region towering above, the deep precipices that fell beneath, the waving blackness of the forests of pine and oak [. . .], the headlong torrents that, dashing among their cliffs, sometimes appeared like a cloud of mist, at others like a sheet of ice—these were features which received a higher character of sublimity from the reposing beauty of the Italian landscape below, stretching to the wide horizon, where the same melting blue tint seemed to unite earth and sky.”

Radcliffe is describing scenery that is “sublime”—meaning powerful rather than beautiful—to heighten tensions and echo the mental state of her characters.

The landscape imagery of Radcliffe’s novels does seem to beg for visualisation. And at least one graphic novel adaptation of it has been produced.

Radcliffe herself was indebted to sublime landscapes. Just like the Romantic painters who were here contemporaries, she looks back to the tradition of Banditti paintings by Salvator Rosa, such as the one in our seminar room. In fact, Radcliffe makes concrete reference to Salvator Rosa in one of her novels when describing scenery.

As I mentioned in my first talk, “Gothic Associations,” Radcliffe’s novels also inspired a number of landscape paintings, such as Lady Blanche Crosses the Ravine Guided by the Count and Saint Foix, a Scene from “The Mysteries of Udolpho” (late 1790s) by the Irish artist Nathaniel Grogan (c. 1740 – 1807). In turn, a reproduction of the painting made it onto the cover of a study about Radcliffe’s writing in relation to Romanticism and the Gothic.

Why Caspar David Friedrich’s Romantic painting was chosen for the cover of an edition of Frankenstein can be explained and justified by this passage from the novel:

“The immense mountains and precipices that overhung me on every side—the sound of the river raging among the rocks, and the dashing of the waterfalls around, spoke of a power mighty as Omnipo[tence]—and I ceased to fear, or to bend before any being less almighty than that which has created and ruled the elements, here displayed in their most terrific guise […].”

So, this is an indication of Victor Frankenstein’s hubris—his presumption, his God complex. Someone so fearless is incapable of distinguishing between power and the beauty. His mind and soul is in sublime territory:

“Ruined castles hanging on the precipices of piny mountains; the impetuous Arve, and cottages every here and there peeping forth from among the trees, formed a scene of singular beauty.  But it was augmented and rendered sublime by the mighty Alps, whose white and shining pyramids and domes towered above all, as belonging to another earth, the habitations of another race of beings.”

Caspar David Friedrich’s sublime painting does not strike me as “gothic.” But what it serves to suggest about Victor Frankenstein’s character is.

In the second passage from Frankenstein that I just read, Mary Shelley gives us an inventory of gothic landscape tropes, beginning with the seemingly ubiquitous “ruined castle.”

One such ruin, painting by the British-born US American artist Thomas Cole, made it onto the cover of a study on art and the Gothic imagination in nineteenth-century USA. And that book, by Sarah Burns, is worth considering in its attempts to arrive at a definition of visual Gothic. This is how Burns begins her discussion:

“I knew that there was a substantial and rapidly expanding body of history and criticism on the gothic tradition in American literature […].  Why was there no similar corpus of work on a gothic tradition in American art? How could the gothic in American culture be limited to one medium? Was it possible to trace a gothic strain in the history of American art, tying together misfits and mainstream painters? And how might the answers to those questions alter the contours of the American art-historical canon? I determined to find out.”

Burns attempts to create a counter-narrative, a narrative that runs counter to the “American dream” narrative and the belief in progress. And he looked toward the landscapes of Salvator Rosa, whom he imagined—and imaged—working on one of his banditti paintings.

Although Burns does not discuss Cole’s 1836 painting of the Oxbow, it served my purpose of demonstrating that Cole was conflicted, anxious. Cole places himself in the middle of the composition, between darkness and light, storm and calm, wilderness and so-called civilization.

Cole was an artist with a hybrid identity—born in Industrial England and moving as a young man to the still young United States. There he encountered the destruction of nature, the domestication of the countryside, and the victimization of the indigenous population that was driven from the land, hunted and killed. It is guilt, anxiety and doubt that warrant the use of the term “gothic” in interpretations of Cole’s paintings.

“In Cole’s gothic wilderness, the New World was a paradise lost almost from the start,” Sarah Burns writes, applying the word “gothic” to Cole drew on American fiction, as in this painting of a scene from Landscape with Figures: A Scene from “The Last of the Mohicans” (1826).

The Last of the Mohicans is often argued to be the first American novel. In fact, this Gothic novel, by Charles Brockden Brown, was written decades earlier. This neglect is another reminder how the gothic, even certifiable genre Gothic, has been sidelined in academic studies until fairly recently.

Making her case for a gothic in US American visual culture, Burns argues that “Cole carried into painting what the American gothic novelist Charles Brockden Brown (1771-1810) had attempted to create in fiction: a dark vision of the American landscape as a place of mystery and terror.”

Burns’s study includes a discussion of paintings by Washington Allston. Allston is widely regarded as the first American painter. He was also the author of a gothic novel, Monaldi. “There is a fascination in fearful objects so strong with some,” Allston’s narrator remarks, “as oftentimes to counteract the will.” What Burns’ study drives home is that this “fascination” is far more prevalent than the traditional narratives of art history lead us to believe.

Burns’s study makes an effort to define “gothic” in terms not derived from architecture. My “gothic,” Burns writes—drawing attention to the subjectiveness of her study—”is at some remove from the ‘Gothic’ architectural and decorative style that enjoyed a romantic and ecclesiastical revival in the nineteenth century.” Cole’s work features imaginary medieval architecture. But that alone is not what makes his work a candidate for the modally “gothic.”

Burns identifies connections between literature and visual arts because, as we have seen, they are clearly drawn by artists working in the late-eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; artists under the influence of Gothic literature, as the American painter John Quidor was when he painted Headless Horseman Pursuing Ichabod Crane (1858), which visualizes a scene from “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” a 1820 short story set in the US and written—in England—by an American writer.

Despite all those clear signs of influence of Gothic fiction on the visual arts, Burns’ definition of “gothic” is “at some remove from the English literary gothic tradition initiated by Horace Walpole, Ann Radcliffe, and “Monk” Lewis […].  Fictions of a revolutionary era, these narratives featured wicked monks and corrupt aristocrats as villains bent on persecuting innocent maidens and brave youths.  Their landscapes were brooding and their settings ruinous or sublime: rotting castles, labyrinthine dungeons, medieval fortresses on crags.”

“What had all this to do with America?” Burns asks. “Why would such fictions continue to resonate in a country that did not have a medieval past?” Our question is similar, but not as culturally specific: What has all this to do with us, with the contemporary, the world in which we live now.

Burns sets out to “broaden and complicate our ideas of the gothic and its meaning in nineteenth-century American visual culture—especially in painting.” She “define[s] this ‘gothic’ as the art of haunting, using the term as container for a constellation of themes and moods: horror, fear, mystery, strangeness, fantasy, perversion, monstrosity, insanity […].”

“Beyond the question of style,” Burns reminds us, “the gothic is a mode of pictorial expression that critiques the Enlightenment vision of the rational American Republic as a place of liberty, balance, harmony, and progress.” There is that term again, “mode,” as distinguished from “style” and “genre.” A way of thinking and doing that transcends cultures and defies classification.

Ultimately, Burns’ definition is rather a grab-bag of ideas: “horror, fear, mystery, strangeness, fantasy, perversion, monstrosity, insanity….” What the text achieves, nonetheless, is a haunting of art history, a questioning of the progress narratives from which the dark side—or any other side, or the other as a cite—has long been excluded.

What makes the visual gothic “gothic” is not simple the presence of sacred architecture or allusions to literature. It is not presence of the figure of the “monk,” pointed out for us by being labeled thus, that is required for a debate whether Friedrich’s Monk by the Sea may be a candidate for the modally “gothic,” especially now that, after its conversation, it is far less murky than it has appeared to us for generations. At the heart of the gothic are tension and doubt, not certainty. Not a lack of belief but an absence of definition and the definite.

And landscapes that provide visual representations of misgivings about so-called progress, doubts about the ends of civilization, may benefit from the term gothic, as it helps us to align landscape art with the Gothic fictions expressive of similar states of conflictedness in times of national and personal crises.

Looking back at the seemingly stereotypical images generated by a search engine, we notice that element of uncertainty in landscapes. The lack of clarity brought on by twilight and fog. The indistinct. The indeterminate. The illegible. That is what, as Fuseli insisted, creates terror. “All minute detail tends to destroy terrour,” Fuseli argued in his Lectures on Painting (1801).

What we do not see, what we cannot quite make out—or are unable to read—is key to the experience of what we are confronted with—what we think we see—in works we associate with the “gothic.” This is not quite darkness.

Gothic narratives, too, are rife with the illegible: the undecipherable document, the hidden will, the riddle. In the thriller The Old Dark House—a film that is not based on a Gothic genre novel but may be argued to be modally gothic—a map is rendered illegible by rainwater. The terrain we are travelling through, without a map to guide is, is muddy, murky and treacherous. And that territory is Wales. A mythical Hollywood version of Wales, but Wales nonetheless.

The qualities of mystery in the landscapes of Wales—and of the area around Aberystwyth in particular—were spectacularly exploited in the television series Hinterland. As one review pointed out, the “bleak, opaque, morbidly sinister” landscape is a character all of its own, tantalising […] with its secrets.”

As we are going to examine further in our final lecture, “Gothic Visions,” gothic depends on light as much as it depends on darkness. It is the world of twilight, of almost seeing, the experience of sensing but not quite making sense.

Twilight is the title of one of the series of photographs that the artist Gregory Crewdson, assisted by a large crew, stages like a cinematographer. We have looked at one of Crewdson’s interiors in the context of “Gothic Bodies.”

Crewdson’s landscapes are narrative, but, their effect derives from the fact that we are not told a sequential story. Instead, we are somewhere in the middle of an unfolding drama, unable to tell with certainty what has happened and what will happen. We don’t know how we got here and where we will end up.

Crewdson’s crepuscular suburban landscapes share this atmosphere of suspense and mystery with Rosa’s banditti paintings. While working on the Twilight series, Crewdson stated: “I’m interested in using the iconography of nature and the American landscape as surrogates or metaphors for psychological anxiety, fear, or desire” (1999).

Anxiety, fear, desire, mystery, the uncanny. We have been defining the gothic mode through a vocabulary of related terms. It is a set of words that keep popping up when we read about the modally visual gothic, and that keep coming to mind—perhaps to our aid—when we try to define gothic.

As I said, when I picked up Sarah Burns’ study Painting the Dark Side, I felt excited, reassured and validated seeing landscape examined in the gothic mode. But I am not certain as to the boundaries of the gothic. Attaching the label “gothic” to a sublime landscape or a landscape with an uncanny atmosphere begs the question: why do not “sublime” and “uncanny” suffice.

As I said when we first looked at one of Crewdson’s earlier photographs from his series Natural Wonder, Credwson’s work was also on show in Gothic, the first exhibition to explore the visual gothic. A reviewer wrote that Crewdson’s “bio simply does nothing to prepare the un-initiated for these fantastical, apocalyptic, utopian, droll, gothic, paradoxical, magnificent images he creates.”

“[F]antastical,” “apocalyptic,” “utopian,” “droll,” “paradoxical,” “magnificent.” What does “gothic” add to this vocabulary? Might it be that the reviewer uses the word “gothic” merely because the work was exhibited in Gothic, that it was already labeled “gothic” by someone else?

Trying to navigate the modally “gothic” is an experience that might itself be described as “gothic.” It is a journey fraught with uncertainty. We might find ourselves groping, grasping and grappling in the twilight, without a reliable map to guide us.

So, we started out at a burial ground. And we have returned to a plot of land where a body lies decomposing.  “The specifics of the landscapes may change,” the writer James Bell says in his brief essay on “Haunted Landscapes.” That said, Bell adds, “they all share an expressive power to convey the frightening and the repressed.” That is what it means to be looking at the “gothic,” and at “gothic landscapes,” modally: to look out for and go in search of imagery beyond the inventories of genre and style.