As Well As Entertain You, The Gothic Will Help You Develop Your Critical Thinking And Overcome Your Fears

The first time I approached my language students with some Gothic texts I was nicely surprised by their reactions. For me the Gothic has always been my hidden place, my dark secret, something that only belonged to me and that I only really showed during Halloween.

Over the years I mastered the quality of my classes using dark topics as an excuse to continue investigating what I loved the most. And as I went deeper in my investigations I realised that when trying to create material on topics such as behaviour, cultural perceptions, identity or mental problems, the Gothic was full of possibilities.

This became more evident, when helping one of my students and friend overcome her communication fears in her own mother tongue. She wanted to become more confident when expressing herself to write her biography. To do that we read and analysed texts together that introduced her to some basic concepts and tools.

To help her to have a higher understanding of texts, we worked on literary devices, definition of concepts, types of texts, how to sound interesting when writing, among other aspects. We also chose Nada by Carmen Laforet, a compulsory reading still in Spanish curriculums. I knew that if she wanted to go back to some academic studies one day, this reading would definitely help her.

This specific student didn’t just learn about style, literary devices such as metaphors, alliterations or synesthesias. She was also gobsmacked by the amount of Gothic elements that a book tagged with the Impressionism label could contain. She also saw my frustration about the lack of knowledge on the Gothic in Spain, despite people loving it.

It was great to see the excitement on her face after discovering that most of the books she loved, such as Rebecca by Daphne Du Maurier and Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë, are Gothic books and that Spanish works by writers such as Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer or Emilia Pardo Bazán are full of Gothic elements. From that moment on, her critical thinking started ticking and she was able to connect all the pieces. She started asking questions like what, how, when and why, and was able to use the strategies learnt in class to find multiple answers. For her, the academic discovery was also an identity discovery.

This experience made me realise I could use my passion for the Gothic to help people:

• Become more confident with their own written communication skills
• Discover all about their fears
• Develop a taste for discovering more about themselves through those spaces that they had neglected due to misconceptions
• Use certain texts to keep working on their own identity

But what is Gothic Literature?

You can go on the internet and find many sites and videos that attempt to define Gothic Literature, but the truth is that the Gothic is pretty difficult to pin down and define. The Gothic is this Frankenstein that has been evolving ever since it was used to describe Germanic tribes, the same ones that contributed to the fall of the Roman Empire and that led to the birth of the European Medieval period back in the 4th Century.

In the words of my friend, Academic and writer Tracy Fahey, the Gothic is the broadest of churches.

And how its Germanic origin is connected to the dark literature of the 18th century is something I should explore in a different article. What you need to know for now if you are new to this world is that the term "Gothic" is the following:

The Gothic was used to categorise a literary movement that didn't conceive reality without its abrupt and savage side provided by death, the monsters of the mind and questioning the world around them and as a reaction to the European Enlightenement movement.

Some basic characteristics

Like in any genre there are certain elements, tropes and symbologies that will make you recognise the Gothic. Think for example of ghostly homes, or eerie landscapes, or of those things that scare you and go boo in the night but that you can’t really see. Think also of the dark and traumatised characters and what makes them become the outcast and even monsters.

All those are the elements that make a book be Gothic, or a film contain Gothic elements. So if you were just thinking about the dark clothes and dark make up, that’s only the aesthetic part of the evolution.

How can Gothic literature help you?

The Gothic doesn’t just entertain you if that is what you are thinking. By going to the dark places of your mind, you will encounter your deepest fears face to face, most of which emerge as a result of the world we currently live in. We are constantly mistrusting the news, we feel manipulated, we don’t know who to believe and everything is a big conspiracy. This is true for every historical moment in which we live, and this is what the Gothic denounces and how it makes you use your critical thinking.

What does Critical Thinking have to do with all this?

Because the Gothic incites you to explore all those areas that make you uncomfortable in a logical and reasonable way, you end up asking questions and investigating further.

You can question things like who is really the monster in our societies or how can we be happier if the world is full of evil around us. But we also learn to accept that part of us that we keep repressing and that it contains so much information about who we are and what makes us be us.

Communication and the Gothic

The greatest philosopical conversations and descriptions of our deeper worries and existencial questions take place in the works of authors such as Edgar Allan Poe, Mary Shelley and even on TV series such as Midnight Mass. Have you thought of the difficulty of describing what you cannot see but that you sense, or what is only in your head and what may not even have a reference in your physical world?

Trying to find new ways of using and combining your vocabulary creates new pathways in your brain when you are a writer and it also creates a higher level of experience in your readers that will trigger empathy, tap into their senses and make them discover new things, even things about themselves they were not aware of. There’s a lot of research being conducted nowadays through MRI scans that support this.

Why should Gothic literature be included in school curriculums?

When you see all the benefits that Gothic literature can bring to the experience of watching, reading or even creating your own stories, undoubtedly the next step is to ask yourself why it’s not explored more in the classrooms. And again, after much research, my honest opinion is that some teachers are not prepared for a genre where they themselves feel uneasy with. Remember that the Gothic is all about taking you to uncomfortable places.

Societies are now trying extremely hard to remove painful moments and experiences from their children’s lives, when really the healthy thing to do is to allow them to feel loss and to mourn when the time comes. Even talking openly about the death of a family member without stigmatising them or criticising their thoughts is something adults still don't know how to do.

We find it uncomfortable to talk about bodily decomposition or we laugh at those who talk about the afterlife, and by doing those things we castrate part of who we are. In our crusade for beauty we chase impossible ideals that create censorship around what is considered ugly and uncomfortable. As a consequence some do monstruous mutilations to their bodies that can even endanger their health.

The worst monsters of all are inside us; the most destructive seeds are those we plant within ourselves, and in writing ourselves, we take charge of this machine, steering it from the darkness of the past into a possible future.

I Spit Myself Out, Tracy Fahey, October 2020

As my friend Tracy Fahey says in the previous quote, what we need to do if we want to move forward, from whatever dark corner we are in, is to voice the dark thoughts inside of us. By doing that, we will be helping ourselves and others step into the world of our psyche to move forwards.

Conclusions

1. As teachers and mentors there’s still much more to discover from the Gothic mode.
2. As a society we would be happier if we didn’t avoid talking about the uncomfortable threats.
3. Like my friend who worried about expressing herself efficiently, the Gothic helped her make wonderful discoveries about herself through something she had a misconception of.
4. How you turn your relationship with the Gothic into a self-learning tool will depend on how much you dare face your deepest fears.

I hope you have enjoyed this article. Thanks for reading.

© Alicia Domínguez