Words of the Month - Gothic Identity Crisis

         How did the word Goth manage to morph from a blond barbarian to a death rock fan with black eyeliner, by way of Notre-Dame de Paris cathedral?  The twists and turns the word has taken over nearly two millenia are a great illustration of the influence of culture and political power on our interpretations of words.

        This isn’t a history blog so I’m not going to go in-depth on the history, but we’ll start with the various Gothic tribes of Europe.  Probably ultimately of Scandinavian origin, the Goths were famous for their warriors.  Most of our accounts of them come from Roman authors, and the Romans both recruited Goths into their own army in large numbers, and experienced raids from the Goths for centuries, so the warrior aspect was what they paid the most attention to.  Eventually Goths made up a significant proportion of the Roman army, but of course the most famous historical point was the Sack of Rome by the Visigoths in 410 CE.  History (written, again, first by Romans and then by Roman admirers during the Renaissance) gave goth the definition “uncivilized barbarian, savage despoiler,” which appears in English in the 1660s.

        Meanwhile, Giorgio Vasari and the Italian Renaissance architects, who admired all things classical, used the word gothic disparagingly to refer to the art and architecture of northern Europe in the Middle Ages.  The implication was that this style was a) in opposition to Roman style and b) Germanic — and therefore barbaric.  This definition (“medieval architectural style”) entered English around 1640.  Of course the builders of the great Gothic cathedrals of Europe had not called their own style “gothic.”  They generally called it Latin for “French work,” “modern work,” or “new work”!  Not to mention that the Goths as a distinct people had pretty much ceased to exist by the sixth century, long before the earliest Gothic architecture in the twelfth century.

        Time passed, and eventually fashion circled around to a Gothic Revival in architecture, which began slowly but picked up steam in the late eighteenth century.  (Political oomph was provided to the movement by reaction to the ugliness and new troubles caused by growing industrialism, as well as reaction to the republicanism of the United States and France, and finally by powerful high church members of the Church of England who were embracing the Catholic roots of their religion.)  Meanwhile, in 1764 Horace Walpole lived in a Gothic Revival “villa” he had built, and there he wrote The Castle of Otranto, a dark and gloomy medieval tragedy set in a dark and gloomy medieval castle.  By the second edition Walpole had subtitled his novel A Gothic Story, and spawned a literary craze.  So now the word gothic had yet another meaning in English: characterized by an aesthetic of fear and haunting, threat of supernatural events, a typically dark and claustrophobic atmosphere, and melodramatic elements such as vengeance, murder, and imprisonment, which often serve as metaphors for psychological or social conflicts.  All these connotations were a sort of synthesis between the idea that gothic meant “barbarous, terrifying, and opposed to the rationality of the Enlightenment,” while simultaneously embracing that opposition and admiring (indeed, wallowing in) melodrama, extreme emotion, and “atmosphere.”

        Then in 1979 music reviewers were describing post-punk band Joy Division as “Gothic” based on its dark aesthetic and gloomy lyrics.  And thus the word came to be applied to the goth subculture of post-punk music and fandom, which is centered on music, fashion, and life-style.  There are numerous sub-divisions of goth music and culture, but in general they involve a lot of black.  Black hair, black nail-polish, eye-liner and lipstick, black leather, black fishnets…  You could say that the one thing these most recent goths have in common with the original Goths is that they both see themselves as rebels outside the dominant empire.

        What’s the first meaning you think of when you hear the word gothic?  And where do you think this ever-evolving word will go next?

[Pictures: Reconstruction of a Gothic long house of late 2nd century, Masłomęcz, Poland (Image from Wikimedia Commons);

Goths Cross a River, painting by Évariste Vital Luminais, 19th century (Image from Wikimedia Commons);

Facade of Reims Cathedral, late 13th century (Image from Wikimedia Commons);

Choir of ChartresCathedral, early 13th century (Image from Wikimedia Commons);

Virgin of the Annunciation, painted stone sculpture, ca. 1300-1310 (Image from The Met);

Strawberry Hill House, designed by Horace Walpole, 1749- ca. 1774 (Image from Wikimedia Commons);

Detail of frontispiece to The Mysteries of Udolpho by Ann Radcliffe, 1794 (Image from Wikimedia Commons);

Baroque Skeleton Lamp, gothic decor by The Blackened Teeth, 2024 (Image from The Blackened Teeth);

Robert Smith performing with The Cure, 1989 (Image from Wikimedia Commons).]