![]() I never want to go there, but am always pulled there. Whenever I am at Paris, I am dragged by invisible force into the Morgue. Clever wordsmith and #1 Victorian novelist Charles Dickens was no exception-his special place was the city morgue. In The Uncommercial Traveller, he wrote: According to biographer Jeffrey Meyers, though her “dress was grotesque and she was playing a tragi-comic role, did not seem to notice.” He noticed later, when she refused to sleep with him, and then left him in the morning.Įveryone who’s anyone has a favorite spot in Paris. Katherine Mansfield wore a black mourning dress and a black straw hat to her first wedding, which would be even goth-er if she actually liked her new husband, but she did not. He was unwanted, unwelcome, somehow meant to die, meant to be carried off.” Later in life he liked to sit with his loved ones as they were dying, and draw them. Sendak was obsessed with death from a young age, due in part to his many illnesses, and also because, as Roiphe explained, “when he was very small, his parents told him that when his mother was pregnant they went to the pharmacy and bought all kinds of toxic substances to induce a miscarriage, and his father tried pushing her off a ladder. Wilhelm Grimm’s letter “Dear Mili, to a child whose mother had died.” A grief-struck letter he wrote at 16 to his future self on the day Franklin Delano Roosevelt died, full of lavish adolescent sorrow, railing against the people who just chattered and laughed as if nothing had happened. According to Katie Roiphe, Sendak had a whole collection of “beloved objects that dealt with death: Mozart’s letter to his father telling him that his mother was dead. That wasn’t the only morbid piece of memorabilia he kept, either. ![]() More to the point, the creator of Where the Wild Things Are kept the original death mask of John Keats in a wooden box at the foot of his bed and would take it out and stroke it, and then lay it down on his own pillow after waking up in the morning. She wrote until 11 each morning, gazing out at the ghosts of her dead dogs-whom, by the way, she also thought she could speak to.įirst of all, Maurice Sendak famously said he wanted a “yummy death,” which seems pretty goth as these things go. She was so into them that she buried them all in a doggy graveyard on a small hill visible from the window of her bedroom, which was also the place where she wrote some of her greatest works. You may already know that Edith Wharton was really into her dogs. After her death, the heart was found, wrapped in silk, in her desk drawer, along with a copy of Adonaïs, Percy’s elegy for Keats. As if that’s not goth enough-apparently he may have suffered from a “progressively calcifying heart”-Shelley reportedly then carried his stone heart around with her for the rest of her life. His remains, once retrieved, were cremated-but for some reason, his heart refused to burn. Here’s how it happened: Percy Bysshe Shelley drowned under mysterious circumstances a month before his 30th birthday. Mary Shelley was for sure the most goth author of all time-not only did she write Frankenstein, widely considered to be the first horror novel, but she also kept her husband’s heart wrapped up in a silk handkerchief on her person at all times. ![]() See a few authors that I’d put in the category below-and add your own gothic favorites in the comments. Goth is a style, a mood, an obsession with death, a wardrobe full of black clothing-well, it’s like art or pornography: you know it when you see it. Nor does writing gothic literature, unless you do it in a candle-lit cave or something. Since you asked, no, killing yourself doesn’t make you goth. So, to celebrate her birthday (though honestly, she’d probably prefer a celebration for her death day), I was inspired to take a look at some other notorious goths from literary history, or at least those writers who have proved themselves goth-like. Today marks 220 years since the birth of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, whom you know as the author of Frankenstein and perhaps the greatest goth-literary or otherwise-that ever drew (hollow, ragged, romantic) breath.
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