Along with the resurgence of supernatural horror in popular literature, recent years have seen numerous, sophisticated studies of the progenitors of the contemporary tales of unearthly terror--the Gothic novels of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, from Walpole Otranto to Maturin Melmoth. Yet for all this attention, the Gothic novel--that cluster of elements involving antiquated settings, stylistic sublimities, a focus on evil, and, of course, supernatural terrors--remains a difficult form to understand historically. David Punter recently framed the historical question neatly: "A yearning for the fantastic may in some sense be ever-present, but it certainly is not ever-manifest, and it is a great deal more obvious in English literature between 1765 and 1820 than it was, say, between 1720 and 1765." Why, in short, did the Gothic appear when it did?

The fact that the question still must be asked points to the inadequacy of the older answers, which simply lumped the Gothic in with "graveyard" poetry, the sublime, the sentimental novel, and more, then proceeded to label the lot "pre-Romanticism" and were done with the issue. More recent answers have not been without problems either. The usual explanations of the Gothic (if I may oversimplify for brevity) tend in one or more of three directions. The first view suggests that the Gothic represents a revolt against the rigidities of the Augustan Age of Reason. One wonders how the age marked by Gulliver's Travels, The Duncaid, and, say, Tom Jones--to say nothing of a determined stress on the limits of private reason and metaphysical speculation--ever became stereotyped as being "dominated by a strict concept of reason." A second explanation sees the Gothic as a (covert) rebellion against inherited authority, a form with spiritual kinship to the French Revolution. Such a view is plausible for, perhaps, William Godwin, Lord Byron, and Mary Shelley, but one has trouble attributing rebellious sentiments to Walpole or the proper Mrs. Radcliffe, not to mention Clara Reeve, whose intentions were determinedly anti-Jacobin. The third and most common view explains the Gothic in Freudian terms as an exploration, increasingly self-conscious, of the hidden sexual regions of the psyche. This approach embodies a concealed teleology that sees, for instance, the Gothic reaching an "arrival at consciousness" with James The Turn of the Screw. Tzvetan Todorov draws such premises to their logical conclusion: "Psychoanalysis has replaced (and thereby made useless) the literature of the fantastic. There is no need today to resort to the devil to speak of sexual desire." Obviously, the supposedly obsolete demons are still active and popular in a culture saturated with psychoanalysis and sexuality: one questions, therefore, the premise. Indeed, even David Punter's Marxist and Freudian categories cannot quite explain the form's popularity. If the Gothic is simply the literary analysis by the bourgeoisie of its aristocratic predecessors and its own rise to power, these concerns should long ago have been addressed and the form become defunct.