Characters in Gothic novels get themselves into all sorts of strange situations. What would an advice columnist suggest when confronted with their issues? Find out by reading Gothic Vault, an advice column exclusively for tormented characters and their dreadful, eerie, bump-in-the-night dilemmas.
I’m (re)reading The Monk: A Romance, by Matthew Lewis. This novel is considered one of the forerunners of the Gothic mode. Do not be fooled by the subtitle! Romance, in this case, is not lower-case “r”omance, although The Monk has plenty of more or less dysfunctional romantic entanglements. This is capital “R”omance, which descends from the German Anti-Enlightenment movement known as “Strum und Dreng,” or “storm and stress.” Romanticism is a harkening back to the good-old Medieval days, complete with damsels in distress and chivalrous knights: in other words, before the Industrial Revolution and logic came around to ruin the purported fun of starvation, illness, and illiteracy. While I am quite partial to the phrase “storm and stress,” I am not an aficionado of the “R”omance oeuvre. I prefer the Gothic shores upon which all those stressful storms stranded”R”omance.
(From now on Romance means “R”omance.)
The Monk takes the traditional Romantic tropes down a dark path tortured by sharp turns and dead ends (of the literal sort: the women die). The characters make an astonishing number of bad decisions. Angst, melodrama and witchcraft ensue. As does kidnapping, murder and rape. The titular Monk is a character study in narcissism. The Prioress of the convent is on a power trip. The love-struck, chivalrous men are prone to fits of melancholia which leave them prostrated in their bedchambers for weeks. The cross-dressing sorceress is the only character with a backbone, albeit one made of evil forged in brimstone. She is, perhaps, the only character who neither needs advice nor would deign to seek it. The others? The Gothic Vault advice column is for them!
Gothic Vault is Erzsebet’s advice column for tormented, Gothic characters and their dreadful, eerie, bump-in-the-night dilemmas. Erzsebet is the author of Gothic characters. This makes her abundantly qualified to dispense no-nonsense wisdom to those penned by others.
Erzsebet Carmean 