Gothic intertextuality can be seen as a vampiric form of drawing elements from other texts, of sucking key ideas and characteristics into its own narrative body to nourish and enrich itself. Intertextuality exists everywhere in all literary genres, but Gothic intertextuality stands apart from the usual usage as it both subverts and perverts the meanings and intentions of the original text, in a bid to overturn, question and invert its significance. Examples of this can be seen in both Frankenstein and Jekyll and Hyde, where Biblical references are made for the sole purpose of challenging and undermining its religious import, thus constituting a form of blasphemous truncation. In the latter novel, Ephesians 2:14 is used to refer to Jekyll's use of science to split himself into two beings, thus deviating from and upending the original Biblical meaning. The multiplicity of jarring intertextual sources used in Gothic texts also works to create deliberate dissonance and deep destabilization within its narratives, an effort aligned with the Gothic quest to critically interrogate, topple and displace existing social norms and beliefs, revealing the darker nature of the self and society that lies hidden within. A key example would be the use of Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” in Frankenstein, where the Romantic journey motif is subverted by the lack of proper end or closure to Walton and Victor’s physical and scientific journeys undertaken, thus refuting the possible positive ending to Coleridge’s poem.
By contrast, some pieces of stories in the Gothic are picked up and re-used wholesale in other publications. From a modern perspective, this type of 'intertextuality' might sound a lot like plagiarism, but it is important to remember that notions of a text's authorship and ownership were very different in Eighteenth Century England. There was no such thing as intellectual property as we know it today. In 1796, for example, when The Monk was published, the act of borrowing pieces of stories from other texts was not unusual, and not considered a moral offense. If done improperly, however, plagiarism in the 1790s was considered a crime against aesthetics. Borrowing was acceptable as long as the author found a way to improve upon the borrowed material, either by adding context or incorporating the material into a pleasing new style or voice. The public outcry against Matthew Lewis' use of other texts in The Monk was more due to the foreignness of his sources and the bloodiness of his prose than any ethical ideas about intellectual property.
Courtesy of Wendy Fall, Marquette University and Magdalene Poh, National University of Singapore
Mazzeo, Tilar J. Plagiarism and Literary Property in the Romantic Period . Philadelphia : University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007. Print.
OAKCLIFFE HALL OR THE FATAL EFFECTS OF FEUDAL QUARRELS. A Tale of the Fifteenth Century [Transcript], Sarah Scudgell Wilkinson
Priory of St. Clair; OR SPECTRE OF THE Murdered Nun. A GOTHIC TALE [Transcript], Sarah Scudgell Wilkinson
The Vindictive Monk or The Fatal Ring [Transcript], Isaac Crookenden