Remembering the Past

[AliceChell]

Since I have been on this forum, I have often looked back to the archives and read with great interest and admiration the threads that explored so thoroughly the many aspects of gothic romance literature.

I would imagine that those of you who have been members for some time must remember with fondness many of these past contributors, and probably miss them as well. I tend to be a sentimental person, and I find myself poignantly thinking of past friendships that probably existed among various members.

Well, one thing is for certain. Anyone who reads the past "history" of this forum, would have to agree that talented and expressive people took part in some very pertinent and thought-provoking conversations.
A toast, then, to the past!

[Penfeather]

Luckily, the exchanges on this forum continue, and new members appear every day. So in that sense I'll enlarge on your toast to include the present and future, since in this case their connection is easy to see.

If you don't mind me running off on a tangent, though, I'd say that the past in general, or preoccupation with it, is a theme impossible to avoid in any discussion of Gothic literature.

Obviously, a strong sense of the past is common to most readers of Gothic Romance. I'd say it's practically a requirement for appreciation of the genre. Without wanting to morbidly over-analyze it, I'd say that it boils down to a nostalgic longing for an idealized past (because whether the real past would in fact be preferable is questionable, and probably irrelevant). It's easy to romanticize the past, although that doesn't mean that certain aspects of life in the past would not have better suited certain temperaments whose misfortune it has been to be born too late. The fun of a genre like Gothic Romance is that it is, of course, romantic; it mists over the harsher realities of the period to offer up a more appealing picture. Some of us might prefer to live in the 1840s -- so long as we were members of the upper class and never got a toothache. Or tuberculosis.

It's precisely this fictionalized, idealized past that I find tempting about the genre (and other historical fiction genres). When I say "idealized" I don't mean that only good things happened. Obviously it wouldn't be Gothic without evil in the world. But that evil, too, is idealized, given grandeur when embodied in the Gothic villain or anti-hero. The Gothic villain's motives are never petty or base, even if they are self-serving; their grandeur is that of theatric tragedy. The true Gothic antagonist always destroys himself.

Even the recent past seems safer and more pleasant in the Gothics written in the 1950s, '60s and '70s. The stories ostensibly take place in time periods during which many of us readers were alive, and yet . . . the world they inhabit seems impossibly far-off, a stage facsimile, an alternate universe in which everything is simpler and more picturesque. Sometimes I put the book down and think, "I remember when the world felt like this . . . or did it?"

[AliceChell]

Luckily, the exchanges on this forum continue, and new members appear every day. So in that sense I'll enlarge on your toast to include the present and future, since in this case their connection is easy to see.

I hope I did not give a wrong impression. In praising this forum's past, I did not mean to slight its present or future.
However, I do not mind your tangent at all. It's far better than my original post. I enjoyed reading yours more than I did writing mine.

[Penfeather]

I hope I did not give a wrong impression. In praising this forum's past, I did not mean to slight its present or future.
However, I do not mind your tangent at all. It's far better than my original post. I enjoyed reading yours more than I did writing mine.

You are too kind. The point you brought up was quite resonant. I've been thinking about the apparent conflict of wisdom between the common adage, "You shouldn't dwell in the past" and the rather obvious fact that all of storytelling, all of man's mythology, is about the past (and idealizing it). Even futurism, sci-fi, is told in the past tense and can only draw on what humanity has been so far.

Up until publishers ceased to print Gothics in the late '70s, many "contemporary" Gothics were set in the present. I wonder, though, if this would still be appropriate for the genre today if it were to become popular again. Somehow, the Gothic atmosphere seems incompatible with cell phones, Twitter, Facebook, GPS navigation systems and other forms of global instant communication (sorry, GothicRomanceForum.com -- I know I'm a hypocrite). I think I could accept a new Gothic set in the late 1970s, possibly even the very early '80s (up until home computers appeared), but not later. Unless, perhaps, the setting were so remote, so removed from technology and modern living, that the atmosphere of an earlier period could be preserved. But anyway I imagine that any hypothetical new crop of Gothic writers would prefer to work in the traditional period of the 19th Century.

[AliceChell]

Although I would like to believe in such a resurgence of the gothic romance as you describe, Penfeather, I really do not. I think that the day of the type of story that many of us seem to like ( I'm speaking here of classics like Jane Eyre and Rebecca, and 60's and 70's gothic romances a la early Victoria Holt) is really over.
The main reason is that I feel the values of this world have deteriorated in that what is accepted (and expected) in literature is so different than what it was all those years ago when these books were both written and published.
It's a standard of decency that I am speaking of and a value for purity. In our modern world, a virginal, ingenue heroine such as those in the past gothics would be to many readers laughable. But not, of course, to all. I believe that those who love the traditional romantic suspense/gothic are charmed by the innocence and integrity of these heroines, whether they realize it or not.
Not to belabor the point, but right and wrong in moral issues has become so blurred that there often seems, to me, no line separating them.
So, for now at least, the type of gothics that I search for in used bookstores, book sales and online, in common with others, seems a thing of the past.
But you don't know how much I would love to be proven wrong!