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Scottish Gothic:
towards a definition

Scottish literature has had a lengthy and vigorous relationship with the Gothic mode. The mode's key conventions were initiated by the publication in 1764 of the first self-proclaimed 'Gothic story', The Castle of Otranto by the English novelist, antiquarian and politician Horace Walpole. Following on from the great early Gothic writers Ann Radcliffe and Mathew 'Monk' Lewis, Walter Scott and James Hogg were to adopt these conventions and translate them into a Scottish context. However, this prompts the question: is it possible to identify a continuous and distinct Scottish strand of the Gothic? A number of scholars have examined this concept of Scottish Gothic, arguing that there is indeed something distinctive and even exceptional about the Gothic as manifested in Scottish texts.

In his important article 'Heartlands: Contemporary Scottish Gothic' (1999)¹, David Punter pinpoints that idée fixe of the Gothic – a concern with history – as a defining feature of the texts he discusses. He refers to 'a range of contemporary Scottish fictions, which [...] suggest some of the issues and problems which accompany the depiction of past and present national history', and focuses on 'Gothic's chief mode of functioning, which has to do with a certain dealing with the necessary distortions of history.'² For Punter, a number of examples of contemporary Scottish literature are concerned with distortions of the nation's history (albeit, and perhaps moreover because it is, a stateless nation), in particular the myths and fabrications on which national identity is so often based.

Ian Duncan develops this idea when referring to early Scottish Gothic in his chapter 'Walter Scott, James Hogg and Scottish Gothic' (2001)³. He argues that

The thematic core of Scottish Gothic consists of an association between the national and the uncanny or supernatural. To put it schematically: Scottish Gothic represents (with greater historical and anthropological specificity than in England) the uncanny recursion of an ancestral identity alienated from modern life.4

He acknowledges that this return of the historic repressed is a feature of other traditions (such as in England), but simultaneously claims that it is more acutely present and more specifically pertinent in Scottish manifestations of the mode. Certainly, what should be highlighted in terms of the 'original' Gothic of the later eighteenth and early nineteenth century – that which he specifically discusses in this chapter – is that the incursive past in Scottish texts is not represented by a foreign other (as in Otranto, The Italian and The Monk, for example), but by the other within, usually the Highlander, marked out as dangerously different via language (Gaelic), religion (Roman Catholic) and politics (Jacobite).

Meanwhile, in his introduction to the 2001 collection of short fiction Damage Land: New Scottish Gothic Fiction, Alan Bissett highlights precisely the same concern:

Gothic [...] has always acted as a way of re-examining the past, and the past is the place where Scotland, a country obsessed with re-examining itself, can view itself whole, vibrant, mythic. When myth becomes channelled through the splintered prism of the present, however [...] what emerges can only be something distorted and halfway monstrous. And while the Gothic has often been the conduit for collective fantasies and nightmares, there is something/someone/some body that haunts the fringes of the Scottish imagination…perhaps the whisper of history, pain, feudalism, legend, all or none of these things, but undoubtedly Scotland's is a fiction haunted by itself, one in a perpetual state of Gothicism.5

Any nation that predicates its identity on an affirming common history is on a potentially dangerous trajectory. However, via the co-ordinates of the Gothic, if this body of texts problematise the past as myth then they are capable of highlighting the distortions that past produces in the present – they reveal national myths as Gothic forgeries (forgery being a recurring concept in the mode). Is this the quality that makes 'Scottish Gothic' a pertinent label? [...]

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¹ David Punter, 'Heartlands; Contemporary Scottish Gothic'. Gothic Studies. Volume 1 Issue 1 (August 1999), pp.101 - 118

² Punter, p.101 and p.102

³ Ian Duncan. 'Walter Scott, James Hogg and Scottish Gothic'. A Companion to the Gothic (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001)

⁴ Duncan, p.70