In addition, it demonstrates how literature engages with political discussions held elsewhere in the national public sphere. 3įranke’s novel warrants more extensive, critical attention, not necessarily because it is formally innovative or because it sheds new light on the presence of the Gothic in Dutch literature, but rather because the novel’s engagement with integration, problematized some years earlier by politicians such as Frits Bolkestein and Pim Fortuyn and publicist Paul Scheffer, 4 and a socially sustainable society shows well the possibilities of the Gothic to deal with twenty-first century societal tensions. They end their study Het heilige huis (2006) with an altogether brief analysis of Herman Franke’s novel Wolfstonen, which was published just after the turn of the millennium, in 2003. Buikema and Wesseling’s work has mostly focused on the twentieth century, beginning with Louis Couperus’ De stille kracht (1900) and ending with Renate Dorrestein and Vonne van der Meer’s writing during the 1990s. 2 Via the Gothic, they observe, these authors explored complex and often neglected or ignored histories. Rosemarie Buikema and Lies Wesseling have done impressive work in the past decade in identifying a corpus of Gothic literature written mostly by women writers. It comes as no surprise, then, that modern Low Countries literature can count a number of Gothic novels among its ranks.
Since the 1760s, the mode has developed and transformed into modernity’s fellow traveller (to borrow Jerrold Hogle’s term 1), always spotting those who cannot come along and who are at risk of being ignored or left behind. The novel, filled with knights, Catholic clergymen and inexplicable events, introduced what would quickly become ‘classics’ of the Gothic repertoire.Įven a cursory glance at the literary history of the last 250 years reveals how the Gothic has endured since Walpole’s novel – and, indeed, expanded. Inspired by the architecture of the time, he rebelled against the privileging of reason and order over feelings and chaos. In the middle of the Enlightenment – the age of science, reason and progress –, Walpole harkened back to the magic and occultism of the late Middle Ages to typify his narrative. In its second printing, following a quickly sold-out first print, the book received the subtitle A Gothic Story, a descriptor as odd as it was innovative. With Otranto, British literature found a way to thematize and engage with the anxieties produced as the result of rationalisation, modernisation and industrialisation. Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto, widely considered to be the first Gothic novel, was published in 1764, which retroactively can be characterized as the height of Enlightenment. The Gothic novel emerged in a time of profound societal, cultural and intellectual change. Ultimately, I argue, the gothic is put to work in these novels as a way of dealing with the anxieties about and uncertainties of a postcolonial world. These have their effect on the construction of community, a process that is articulated in both the form and the content of the novels’ narratives. It reveals the continuous renewal of the gothic itself, but also into the changes brought to the Low Countries as a result of globalisation and immigration. An interdisciplinary reading constituted by gothic and postcolonial reading practices brings to the fore new elements of the Dutch and Flemish cultural imaginary. Both novels cast the apartment buildings that are central to their plots as Gothic spaces fraught with images of modern, globalised society, as well as widespread anxiety over societal cohesion in ethnically and culturally diverse cities. This paper looks at two contemporary Gothic novels from the Low Countries, Herman Franke’s Wolfstonen (2003) and Saskia de Coster’s Wat alleen wij horen (2015), which are occupied with contemporary globalisation and immigration to the Netherlands and Belgium. As the representation of Western modernity’s dark undercurrent, the Gothic novel has since its inception in the 1760s developed and transformed alongside that modernity.