Professional paper
The Gothic in James Hogg’s The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner
Tina Čatlaić
Abstract
This paper analyses the novel The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner by focusing on the various elements of Gothic fiction present in James Hogg’s well-known work. Confessions is usually classified as a Gothic novel, notwithstanding that it does not really adhere to Gothic conventions nor is it similar to prototypical works of that genre. Hogg’s novel is complex and thought-provoking; it delves deep into the protagonist’s psyche and invokes a more ambiguous feeling of dread than the pursued maidens and haunted castles of emblematic Gothic works do. The uncanny, a psychoanalytical term strongly associated with the Gothic genre, reaches another level in the Confessions, which is enhanced by the novel’s specific structural framework. The aim of this paper is to compare Confessions with Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto and show that Gothic elements in the former produce a strikingly different effect than in the latter. In Confessions, their function is to shake up what David Miall calls the “hidden architecture of the mind” by blurring the lines between self and other, familiar and unfamiliar, reality and fiction. This is reinforced by the novel’s open-endedness, the use of Doppelgänger characters, the interpolation of Scottish dialect and folklore into the text and various other elements due to which Confessions surpasses the one-dimensionality and predictability numerous Gothic novels of the day were often marked by. Thus, this novel can be considered one of the first major works in the genre frequently called ‘psychological horror’ today.
Keywords
James Hogg; Scottish Romanticism; Gothic fiction; The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner; Doppelgänger; uncanny
Hrčak ID:
317907
URI
Publication date:
17.5.2022.
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