"The Art of Terror: some artistic references in Gothic Literature"

Abstract

The Art of Terror : some artistic references in Gothic Literature.

MARIA ANTÓNIA LIMA

In Gothic Literature, it is common to compare the villain to an artist, a virtuose in the art of murdering, similar to the one portrayed by Thomas de Quincey in “On Murder Considered as one of the Fine Arts” (1827). Sometimes, like in Clockwork Orange, the worst atrocities are committed as they were a work of art, because they obey to the same aesthetic feeling through which a poem, a painting or a musical composition are produced. It’s usual to find, in this literary mode, stories of murders committed by psychopaths worried in imitating the most violent crimes, that were famous, in the past, by their art of killing. Taking their obsession to an extreme and transforming it into a real art, their copies recreate the original crimes to the slightest detail, adjusting each object and recreating sceneries, with exactly the same precision with which an artist learns how to imitate a master. Thus conceived, the criminal act is similar to the artistic act in its necessity of establishing a dialogue with a tradition, to reach the perfection of the techniques that will allow, later on, to obtain certain effects. The reference to William Blake, in Red Dragon by Thomas Harris, is a recent example of this very common practice in the literature of terror. As De Quincey refers in his work: “People begin to see that something more goes to the composition of a fine murder than two blockheads to kill and be killed - a knife - a purse - and a dark lane. Design, gentlemen, grouping, light and shade, poetry, sentiment, are now deemed indispensable to attempts of this nature.”