Teaching Elements Of The Gothic

The AQA syllabus for A2 English Literature includes a component "Elements of the Gothic", which looks at the texts - Frankenstein, Macbeth , Wuthering Heights, The Pardoner's Tale, among others - in the context of the Gothic genre to which they belong. When I delivered A-level literature through this Gothic component - focussing on Frankenstein and Angela Carter's The Bloody Chamber - I was certain that the visual component of the Gothic was crucial in understanding the texts. My belief and practice as a teacher of A-level and beyond is to include as much creative stimulus in lessons as possible - not just to enhance the learning experience, but also to improve it. English literature may be taught simply as discrete collections of texts with words, but this is usually alienating for students brought up in a culture saturated by the visual image. Creatively taught English literature may incorporate visual elements, music, drama - as is obviously the case with Shakespeare's plays, which started out as performances.

In this essay I want to look at the introductory class lessons I taught for this, and also the whole-year activity I created to support these lessons. This helped students to take on board large numbers of key Gothic concepts easily, and to encourage them to discuss the concepts with some degree of familiarity. Just to list and explain the concepts is in my experience less beneficial since they are less proficient at assimilation of large amounts of written or spoken material than they are at digesting images.

Introductory lessons

I began with a lesson where we discussed what the students' previous ideas of the Gothic were: with props - plain chant, a large cross, film stills, purple material. We watched the opening shots of Nosferatu, and I asked them to note their ideas about music, lighting, types of shots, subject matter, and connect them to what the students had just discussed, and also with their previous experience of the Dracula figure in film and literature. This gave us the opportunity to discuss the eerie scenes from the film in the crypt with the skulls and the haunting music, and a sense of the constant nature of death through the aeons of human history, from which the vampire is excluded. We also discussed this morbid figure as a type of the Gothic hero - etiolated, white, with skull-like face and long teeth and fingernails.

For the following lesson I brought in, as a short story, a chapter removed from the Dracula original text, as a bridge between key Gothic concepts and future lessons on The Bloody Chamber. The extract examined the legendary abilities of the undead, and their general effect on the living in traditional narrative. We also explored the very beginnings of these narratives in The Vampyre. A series of images from book covers enriched the discussion. Finally, in groups, students chose a section of about 10 sentences, each group focussing on a different component of the text, so characterisation, plot, structure, key ideas and facets of language were covered. Each group brought back a section of the text which they had annotated in line with their component. The whole class drew all this together focussing on what major themes had emerged as part of the genesis of the Gothic, and gave them the necessary basis for the next stage.

Lecture and workshop

At this stage, rather than have separate inputs from the teaching team for the individual classes taking this component, I thought it would be useful to prepare a lecture and a workshop session for the whole of Year 13, on "Key Aspects". This would provide a detailed introduction to the Gothic, which included everything needed for subject knowledge before they started the texts - the module being "Texts In Context". The session began with a powerpoint of a variety of book cover images and film stills of texts, from The Castle of Otranto to Sara Waters' The Little Stranger. Again the point was to allow students to engage with images which would generate key concepts in their minds by asking them to note down the archetypal features of the images: girls running along dark corridors, ruined castles. This became for us a visual lexicon, and iconography.

Students also had a quick 5 minute "buzz" with a partner to swap notes so far. At the end they were asked to sketch and label a Gothic hero and heroine - and anti-hero if they wanted. More ideas were swapped with a partner and a few brave souls volunteered ideas to the whole group (about three times normal class size.)

After this, I gave my lecture, which incorporated a discussion of the images on the screen and what ideas about the Gothic they were suggesting, culminating in an analysis of Frankenstein, Macbeth, and The Bloody Chamber. I wanted to elaborate some of the more transgressive themes, such as the incest subtext in Frankenstein. I wanted to show them how the Gothic wasn't just Hallowe'en, bats and some gore, but that its roots were decidedly less domesticated, and that the women being tortured, the fangs of the vampire, all have this sexual undertone.

Following a break, the last part of this session had students getting into groups of 3; each group was issued with a series of extracts from the texts we had looked at. The source of each text was not named. They ranged from a descri ption of Satan in Paradise Lost to an extract from The Little Stranger, via The Monk and The Castle of Otranto on the way. Students were assigned an extract and were asked to try and work out plot, character and key themes, linking them to my lecture. They were also asked to try dating the passage and, maybe, to guess the author.

After this I drew things together in a plenary. What had they learned, and how might they take it further? I gave each group "Gothic concept" cards and told them to write definitions for 4 words. Then we did a quiz, seeing which group had come up with the best definitions. Prizes were Krispy Kreme Hallowe'en doughnuts. A sheet of my definitions ensured they had a complete set of notes to ground their own ideas.

Evaluation of the approach

Feedback suggested that the students had enjoyed it and learned something. They preferred the visual elements to the lecture, but appreciated that the latter drew together a lot of material. They also enjoyed the exercise with the extracts: they found it challenging, and helpful in their first Gothic lessons. The balance of activities also allowed the students an experience of different teaching styles - useful for visual learners - and the mini-lecture gave them a foretaste of university. About the only thing I would have changed was to shorten the lecture a bit.

This experience has encouraged me in my philosophy that good teaching should use a variety of techniques, with creative materials and ideas, and build on previous student experiences and knowledge. Good teaching is also always about creating and maintaining excellent relationships with students - I felt that these sessions had achieved this by blending in-depth subject knowledge with an evident desire to reach out to them through creative techniques. Additionally, I already taught one of the groups and so had a very good relationship with them and so I could use this when teaching the larger group which comprised three individual classes.