What are the main features in the Gothic genre?
Gothic novels always revolve around a dark and mysterious plot device usually involving dark secrets and a damsel in distress. Usually they were not supernatural in nature. They also always had a romantic element to them. Jane Eyre was probably the most prototypical Gothic Novel. It involved a good and innocent yet fairly powerless young woman who takes a job as a Governess for an older man in a vast English manner. A scene of great tragedy, the house and the man carried a very dark secret that Jane Eyre would come to know in time. She would also fall in love with and marry the man…only to find that on the day of the wedding the terrible secret would surface most dreadfully. Dracula followed this formula, but added the supernatural element of ‘Eastern Mystery’. That mystery involving the legend of the Vampire and his coming to England. The story played on Victorian England’s xenophobia mixed with its utter fascination of all things ‘eastern’. The works of Edgar Allen Poe also were ve
