What are the Gothic elements in the novel?
The Gothic novel was in vogue in the eighteenth and nineteenth century. According to M. H. Abrams, in A Glossary of Literary Terms (4th edition), the Gothic novel “develops a brooding atmosphere of gloom or terror, represents events that are uncanny, or macabre, or melodramatically violent, and often deals with aberrant psychological states” (p. 72). A typical Gothic novel is Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Edgar Allan Poe’s short stories belong to the same genre, and the term can be more loosely applied to elements in such novels as Charles Dickens’s Bleak House and Great Expectations. Wilde clearly draws on elements of the Gothic novel in The Picture of Dorian Gray, a lurid tale that includes murder, horror and the supernatural. It is the supernatural element that makes the plot work. There can be no rational explanation for how the picture changes to reflect the changing nature of Dorian’s character, or his soul. It is mysterious and eerie, as is the fact that although the novel stretc
