SOURCE: "Learning the Hard Way: Gothic Pedagogy in the Modern Romance Quest," in Comparative Literature, Vol. 36, No. 2, Spring, 1984, pp. 146-61.

In the following essay, Merivale focuses on "Gothic pedagogy," or learning by fear.

A series of works—from Mozart's The Magic Flute (1791) through Goethe's Faust (1806, 1832), Flaubert's La Tentation de St. Antoine (1856), James Branch Cabell's Jurgen (1919), David Lindsay's A Voyage to Arcturus (1920), and Hermann Hesse's Steppenwolf (1927) to John Fowles's The Magus (1966)—employ the devices of what I call "Gothic pedagogy" in their dramatic or narrative structures. Inner artifacts—pageant, vision, performance—provide the hero of each of these "internalized romantic quests"¹ with an astonishing, terrifying, yet phantasmagorical sequence of lessons, made up of separate episodes chiefly connected with each other by the fact that the hero experiences them. These "Gothicized" hero-quests, or Bildungen, are also Gothicized godgames, for a Magus, devil-god and stage-director, has devised and produced them to...