Source: The Gothic Library

Perhaps more so than the other vocabulary words we’ve discussed thus far (the sublime and the uncanny), “grotesque” is a term you’re just as likely to hear thrown about in casual conversation as in academic discourse on Gothic literature. We might use it to describe anything that’s bizarre, incongruous, unnatural, or gross. But where does it come from, and what does it mean in a literary context? Much like the word “Gothic” itself, grotesque has a convoluted and roundabout history that covers a wide range of meanings and takes us back to ancient times.

The word grotesque comes from the Italian word grotto, meaning “cave.” At the turn of the sixteenth century, underground ruins from the basement rooms of a palace built by the Roman emperor Nero in the first century CE were unearthed. Renaissance Europe immediately became enamored of the style of artwork found on the frescoed walls of these cave-like ruins. Specifically, the art world was intrigued by the symmetrical arrangements of decorative patterns featuring foliage, curving tendrils, and fanciful human and animal figures that often served to frame the central images. This style of ornamentation was termed “grotesque” after the grotto in which it was found, and was mimicked in architecture, engravings, and illustrations from the sixteenth century onward. By the eighteenth century, the word grotesque was being used fairly interchangeably with “arabesque” and “moresque,” which referred to a similarly elaborate decorative style from Islamic art.

Over time, “grotesque” became associated less with the symmetrical foliage patterns and more with the element of fantastical human or animal-like figures. In this sense, it began to be retroactively applied to the ornamental sculpted figures that decorate the eaves of medieval churches. A “grotesque” or “chimera” is the technically correct term for any such sculpture that does not contain a water spout, the latter being, of course, a gargoyle.

From there, it is no surprise that the term should leap from Gothic architecture to Gothic literature, intertwined as those two artforms are. In literature, the word grotesque carries with it the aesthetics of the sculpted gargoyles and chimeras—it refers to the monstrous, the malformed, the frightening, and the outright strange. Before the advent of the Gothic genre, the grotesque was often utilized in satire and tragicomedy, its exaggerations and incongruity perfect for blending humor with the dark and tragic. In Gothic literature, we can see this paradoxical aspect of the grotesque in characters that elicit both empathy and disgust from the reader. Take for example the creature in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818): the creature’s appearance is unnatural and frightening, but his story is ultimately a tragedy that the reader cannot help but sympathize with. A similarly outcast figure is Quasimodo of Victor Hugo’s The Hunchback of Notre-Dame (1831), who is generally good-hearted and yet is treated as monstrous by society for his misshapen form. The Disney adaptation really drives home Quasimodo’s connection to the architectural grotesque by surrounding him with talking gargoyles (technically, grotesques, since they don’t drain water).

But one of the first authors to come to mind at the mention of the grotesque is Edgar Allan Poe, particularly since he used the term in the title of one of his short story collections, Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque. This 1840 collection contains twenty-five of Poe’s prose tales, including several of his most famous (e.g. “The Fall of the House of Usher” and “Ligeia”) as well as many that are now more obscure. The inclusion of the two near-synonymous terms “grotesque” and “arabesque” in the title has driven many scholars to speculate on a difference of meaning and attempt to sort Poe’s tales into these two categories. One such scholar and a distant Poe relative, Harry Lee Poe, even suggests that the terms line up with the terror vs horror divide, with “arabesque” referring to the more elevated feeling of terror, while “grotesque” covers the gory and disgusting sort of horror. As with many terms used in Gothic literature, however, a clear definition is difficult to pin down. Poe himself appears to use both the terms “grotesque” and “arabesque” to evoke a loose collection of aesthetic, artistic, supernatural, and literary connotations.

But the grotesque is not just for outright tales of the supernatural. In fact, the unsettling blend of the realistic and the grotesque is a common feature in the American subgenre that has become known as Southern Gothic. Two of the authors best known for this are William Faulkner and Flannery O’Connor. Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying brings back some of the tragicomic elements of the grotesque by depicting the nearly farcical and yet ultimately depressing tribulations of a poor, rural family as they attempt to transport the corpse of their matriarch across Mississippi for burial. In O’Connor’s short story “Good Country People,” the story’s protagonist Joy-Hulga embraces the grotesque. Already doomed to be an outcast and rejected by society due to her prosthetic leg, Joy-Hulga relishes in ugliness and unpleasantness, taking on an intentionally unflattering name and comporting herself with deliberate inelegance. No matter how ugly Joy-Hulga tries to make herself, however, it turns out that the outside world is even uglier. Indeed, using a recognizably grotesque character to expose the ugliness hidden within Southern society is one of the defining features of Southern Gothic.

I hope this has improved your understanding of the word grotesque! What other vocab words would you like to see me cover? Let me know in the comments.