From Shakespeare’s Hamlet to Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie
Queene and Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber, folklore and
fairy-tale has influenced the Gothic across decades and in its many forms. With
its origins in oral tradition, folklore is generally considered the
generational passing down of narratives bound in a particular culture’s beliefs
and customs. Associations with the Gothic perhaps stem from a narrative
tendency to focus on the macabre and the taboo alongside an uncanny use of
anthropomorphised character in fantastic and supernatural situations.
Indeed, a consideration of the relationship between folklore and
the Gothic challenges accepted understandings of the origins of the Gothic
itself. As many critics, such as Eino Railo, have discerned; there are many
similarities between Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto, generally
considered the first Gothic novel, and Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Centering
on legends of witchcraft and ghosts, Hamlet is a text which draws upon
pre-sixteenth-century folklore tradition and one from which Walpole arguably
derived much inspiration for his own tale. In this sense, the Gothic can be
seen to mirror folklore in its pattern of generational narrative continuation
and, it could be argued, even owes its origins to this ancient oral tradition.
 |
| "Whatever you do... don't eat the f***ing candy!" |
The fairy-tale can be considered a genre under the umbrella term
‘folklore’ as it traditionally deals with magic in the realms of the fays and
is found predominantly in European lore. Most famously remembered today are The
Brothers Grimm whose collections of dark, nineteenth century fairy-tales have
inspired a recent cinematic surge in classic remakes from the kick-ass
rendition Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters (2012) to the
gender-redefining Maleficent (2014). Contemporary, post-feminist culture
has had an interesting reaction to the ‘Disneyfied’ adaptations of traditional
fairy-tales from the twentieth century, rendering them out-dated and misogynistic
and thus undoubtedly contributing to the increasing demand in their cinematic
reconsideration. It is not just film, of course, that can be seen to be
reworking these classic tales. J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series is a
fantastic example of a contemporary writer continuing the folklore tradition as
her trolls, dwarfs, boggarts and ‘black dog’ Sirius Black are just a few
examples of figures taken straight from English folklore.
In the Gothic Reading Group’s next meeting we will be discussing
folklore and fairy-tales in the Gothic and we encourage you to bring a
favourite tale or figure along with you. As a die-hard Brontë fan I couldn’t
conclude this post without mentioning Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights as
a perfect example of a Gothic text which is not directly ‘folklore’ or
‘fairy-tale’ in its genre, but engages with the tradition through the character
of Nelly Dean, the oral narrator of ghost story and familial legend with a
fondness for dancing and folk-song. You may wish to bring along a similar
Gothic text to discuss its overlooked or hidden connections with folklore. Or
if you are interested in a particular geography of lore, Slavic or Germanic
perhaps, you may wish to bring along something like Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s
Der Erlkönig which I have left suggestively below for your dark
enjoyment…
Tamsin
Crowther is an MA Literature student on the Nineteenth Century pathway at
Sheffield University. She is interested in Victorian Gothic space and fiction
from the Fin-de-Siècle.
