Gothic Landscapes in Mary Butts’s Ashe of Rings

Abstract

When the Gothic novel emerged in the eighteenth century, it appeared as a reaction to the economic and political conditions prevalent in society at the time, in which “early forces of industrialization were producing vast changes in the ways people lived and worked. Rural patterns of life were being broken up by enclosure of land and by the labor demands of urban-centered industry” (Punter 413). Karl Marx argued that under capitalism man is further alienated from the natural world. The Gothic then addressed such issues of alienation, which were not only external but also internal. Disillusioned with the social climate and rationalistic ideas of the Enlightenment, society turned to the supernatural and the fantastic for answers. Or, as Fred Botting observes, “Uncertainties about the nature of power, law, society, family and sexuality dominate Gothic fiction” (5). The crumbling manor house and separation from an ancestral past reflected the dissolution of a way of life, and the genre appealed to the human sense of longing for return to a natural world that offered a sense of permanence.