‘The Voice of Thunder’: The Formulaic Nature of the Gothic Type-Scene

Abstract

This article rounds off an intensive study of formulaicity in Gothic fiction. After briefly recapping analysis on the compositional levels of formula, formulaic pattern and tableau in the novel The Necromancer (1794), the article concentrates on the next compositional level, the type-scene, understood as an aggregate of tableaux. It shows that the type-scene depicting ghostly apparitions systematically resorts to the same lexical fields and techniques of composition, and that these foreground language over content; the type-scene thus constructed exhibits a multiform structure, and strongly resembles ‘other’ type-scenes respectively depicting a tempest and the Wild Hunt. Detailed analysis leads to seven hypotheses regarding the structure of these type-scenes, the most general of which being that a metonymic principle appears to govern Gothic narrative composition. These hypotheses suggest themselves as stepping-stones towards the construction of a poetics of the Gothic.