Gothic Fiction and The Transgressive Supernatural, or, The Sword and Sorcery Protagonist Has a Sword! by Jason Ray Carney Sometime around 1790, something intangible happened. Trying to settle on any single definitive event is like trying to determine exactly when a pot of water began boiling. It can’t be done. The most we can do is point to a few bubbles: Immanuel Kant boldly defended the scientific method with his Critique of Pure Reason, published in 1781; Edward Cartwright invented the steam-powered loom in 1785; starving peasants marched on the Bastille in 1789, and four years later the revolution executed King Louis XVI and his Queen, Marie Antoinette; and don’t forget Edward Jenner discovered vaccination in 1796. To put it mildly, the 1780s and 90s was a wild time: superstition began to give way to science, agrarian mercantilism to industrialization, monarchism to constitutionalism, and quackery to medicine. In the words of the sociologist Max Weber, the world had become “disenchanted;” the middle-earth of angels and demons overseen by a God judging creation had become an absurd ball of clay peopled by not-quite-animals who groped awkwardly for survival.  Wanderer Above The Sea of Fog The Western Mind was reeling, unsettled from its previous sureties, and so thrown into a thrilling disorientation perhaps epitomized by Caspar David Friedrich’s beautiful painting, Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog (1818). The Westerner was that wanderer, gazing into the uncertain future. Though Feudalism did not completely give way to Constitutionalism, theology to the scientific method, agrarianism to industrialization, a new world was undeniably rising out of the mists. Not only had the world changed, it was continuing to change, and the pace of change was accelerating. We have a convenient catch-all name for this process: modernization. Around 1790, the Western World became modern.  Something else happened around 1790, but in the realm of art and culture. Like modernization, it is hard to pinpoint when this event gelled. We might see the first symptoms of it with the popularity of the so-called “Graveyard Poets,” such as Thomas Gray (1717-1771), who rendered graveyards, tombstones, and decaying bodies as precious reminders that time is running out. We might glimpse it in architecture, in edifices like Horace Walpole’s Strawberry Hill House, a 17th-century villa he transformed into a faux medieval castle complete with crenellations and decorative suits of armor....