Rebels of Reason

There has always been a saying that ‘what goes up must come down’. It is my belief that this saying is what caused gothic literature to be so popular during the eighteenth and nineteenth century of the British Empire. During this period, the British Empire was quickly flourishing. The Empire had acquired vast land and monitorial prosperity, but its people may have had a subconscious sense of impending doom. They may have felt that the empire’s great prosperity would not last. This would have no doubt attracted them to the gloom filled mystery coupled with suspense and tendency to the dramatic and the sensational writing of Gothic literature. Truth be told, however, the flocking response to Gothic literature was a response to the Enlightenment. People in history have often rebelled against things prominent to belief before their existence or coming of age, teenage rebellion. Thus it is no surprise that after the Enlightenment, a period of time that valorized human reason, individuals flocked to literature that ‘presented the irrational viewpoint of human existence.’ Gothic literature explored the supernatural, things that were ‘unreasonable’ to believe in. It portrayed natural events as eerie, making a thunderstorm, for example, something that would chill you to the bone. http://resources.mhs.vic.edu.au/creating/pages/origins.htm