On Gothic and Demons

On Gothic and Demons

Over the course of the semester I have learned through my literature and arts class about the gothic tradition that the term "gothic" almost never appears without some reference, no matter how obscure, to the demonic. The association of demons with the gothic tradition reaches as far back as the Renaissance where the gothic literary tradition was used to criticize the evils of certain political ideas (Smith 3) and possibly even further back to the medieval representation of the gothic as barbaric (or demonic) Germanic tribes (Smith 2). In my short story "Under the Shield" the prospect of the demonic is explored in the context of superficial horned and hoofed caricatures of evil, the context of a man's personal demons from a past experience haunting him into the present, and in the context humans hiding their demonic features under their clothes or, in this case, police uniforms. Other concepts that "Under the Shield" attempts to explore are whether or not justice really exists or belongs in an uncaring world and the connection between the gothic literary tradition and the film noir tradition.

"Under the Shield" features a protagonist named Jack Doyle, a rookie auto-theft detective trying to follow in the shoes of his dead father and become a great detective who never forgot justice. Unfortunately Jack suffers from frequent hallucinations where he imagines the world around him as a demonic version of the real one. In these hallucinations Jack often sees a similar scene play out before him where demons are huddled around a dead angel and one of the demons notices him. Jack's current case in the story leads him along a path where he discovers a group of corrupt cops and the murderer of his father. Jack finds out that his father was murdered by the group of corrupt police (including his father's partner) and that Jack had actually witnessed the scene firsthand. The scene of the demons surrounding the dead angel was actually a demonized version of the scene of Jack's father's murder as seen by young Jack. Jack had unconsciously replaced the memory of his father's death with the demonic version in order to protect his own psyche. In the main storyline Jack must confront his past in order to move on.

According to Valeria Tinkler-Villani "Gothic has meant the communication of devastation, chaos, desolation or dissolution." If this is true then the gothic tradition in "Under the Shield" is the communication of the death of Jack's father, which defines the whole story. Jack's inability to do anything about his father's death, the loss of his greatest inspiration, the fact that it was fellow police officers who were sworn to bring justice to criminals who killed him and, worst of all, that he was too scared to even remember his father's death all haunt Jack in the present and manifest physically as his demonic hallucinations. Likewise, the emotional action

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