Unless you’ve spent the last five decades on Mars, you must know Scooby-Doo – the fearless (cough, cough) cartoon dog chasing ghosts. Believe it or not, what we could refer to as Scooby-Doo Gothic goes back more than 200 years, to Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794).
How, you might ask. What on earth could be the connection between one of the first texts of the Gothic canon and a cartoon show of the late 20th century?
The concept worth examining here – as you might have deducted from the title – is that of the supernatural explained; particularly, how it’s related to the supernatural accepted.
Briefly, there has been a long-standing tradition to divide Gothic texts into the one or the other category. We’ll take a closer look at both of them, and then I’ll explain why I think the differentiation itself is flawed.
