Write a critical appreciation of this passage from 'Gormenghast', relating to your reading of Gothic fiction

Written in 1950, Gormenghast by Marvyn Peake can be considered a modern Gothic text coming centauries after the birth of the Gothic genre and decades after the Victorian rival. Throughout this passage, the writer uses many tropes and themes used in Gothic fiction since it was first established with Horace Walpole’s Castle of Otranto in 1764 in order to explore universal themes of death and corruption that remain prominent anxieties within both ancient and 20^thcentury societies. From the opening lines of the passage, the description of the weather and landscape immediately establishes a sense of confusion and uncertainty within the reader, describing the snow as ‘the blurred pall’ and with the oxymoron ‘darkness of that whiteness’ emphasising the obscurity that is a prominent theme throughout both this extract and a lot of Gothic literature. As this oxymoron subverts the traditional connotations of white being pure and sterile by pairing it with something dark and obscure, Peake is suggesting there are hidden truths in a way to unsettle the reader by referring to the unknown or uncanny. This sense of obscurity is carried on throughout the passage as it moves to describe the birds, the use of the adjectives ‘dazzling’ and ‘blind brilliance’ in places further unsettling the reader as they suggest at ideas of corrupted vision and an inability for any characters to see the danger they have stumbled into in this setting. This idea is reinforced by the strong emphasis on death through the symbol of the birds, their juxtaposition of being ‘black as jet’ against the blindingly white snow-covered setting, while references to life are obscured. The birds themselves are clear, ‘differed only in their silhouette’, while the rest of the landscape seems blurred and out of focus which further unsettles the reader as it suggests that death and corruption are the only certain things here. This blurring of boundaries and the subversion of life and death is another trope seen frequently in Gothic fiction, used to emphasise the obscurity in the extract and continue to unsettle the reader as they are forced to watch death unfold throughout the passage while they are helpless to stop it. The theme of entrapment is also made clear to the reader from the opening description of the extract, the verbs ‘submerged’ and ‘smothered’ that are used to describe the snow that covers the landscape evoking feelings of claustrophobia within the reader and making them feel helpless and surrounded by the setting. This trope to make readers feel overwhelmed and unsettled is seen frequently in Gothic fiction, such as in the opening chapters of Wuthering Heights in which the narrator stumbles lost through a similarly snow filled landscape and with them the reader feels both trapped and overwhelmed by the scenario created by the setting. This feeling that is evoked in the reader links to Freud’s theory of the unconscious and the combined fear and desire to access unknown parts of oneself that was commonly exploited from the beginning of Gothic literature as it strove to go against the Enlightenment and explain what could not be explained. This and the theme of entrapment are further highlighted through the setting of a castle, another typical Gothic setting that is used for the reminder of archaic and aristocratic societies. The hyperbolic description of the castle being surrounded by ‘widespread death’ due to the snow-covered fields and the birds that fill them make the setting isolated and evoke feelings of helplessness within the reader that this corrupted and hopeless setting is so far from civilisation, and therefore so far from any help with the inevitable danger. That the castle itself is made of ‘hundreds of baths and basins’ and ‘crumbs and grain laid in trails’ conveys the labyrinth like structure that makes the reader feel there is no escape and its blunt description of being ‘dead and dying’ makes it a symbol of corruption along with the birds.