Rationalism In Gothic Tales Analysis

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Recommended: Strengths and weaknesses of rationalism

Glendy Jimenez
ENC 1102H
April 28, 2014
Rationalism vs. Irrationalism in Gothic Tales
Over the course of time, there have been many famous books where the characters portray rationality and irrationality to the fullest. The idea of rationalism literature began in the eighteenth century and it was a product of the Enlightenment era. It stressed the rational trend of the period and the attitude that reason and judgment should be the guide to everyday life. Meanwhile, the realist novels in the Age of Reason became the respectable form of literature with its attempts to represent the world from an objective perspective. From this era, sprang a new particular view about the world as a reaction against the Enlightenment’s emphasis on reason. Romantics valued intense emotion and showed more imagination and enjoyment. This period gave birth to Gothic literature, which riddles with the conflicts between rational and irrational. In these traditions, irrational usually refers to instances in which conventional societal roles are broken. This Gothic concept of the battle between the intellectual and rational self and the irrational and the supernatural is portrayed in novels and short stories such as The Castle of Otrento, House of Usher, Imp of the Perverse, and The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.
Horace Walpole’s, The Castle of Otranto, is regarded as the first gothic novel. It laid down many of the plot devices and characteristics that would become typical of the Gothic such as castles, decay of humanity, rough landscapes, and hidden identities. One of the things Walpole tried to do with this story was to blend it Romance of the rime and shift it towards an idea of mystery, hidden passages, ghosts, and the darker side of human ...

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... will once again be able to deal with the subject on an intellectual manner. Also, Hyde is the representation of irrationality since he has an unexplainable air of evil and “gives a strong feeling of deformity” (Stevenson 11). This idea of deformity of the unknown is what fuels the power of the supernatural over the natural. In fact, the death of Dr. Lanyon, who is in the story the embodiment of rationalism, represents the victory that the supernatural has over the logical. However, at the end rationality proves greater since Jeckyll and Hyde die, and Utterson the personification of reason is left behind to fix the mess. This story also explores the dualism in human nature and the battle between rational thought and man’s irrational animal nature. In fact, Stevenson displays Hyde as animalistic since he is hairy and acts according to instinct rather than reason.

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