Dark Aesthete: Gothic Elements in the Fiction of Walter Pater

Walter Pater is today celebrated for his imaginary portraits, ekphrastic meditations on landscape, paintings, and sculpture; for his aesthetic method and prose style. It should now be acknowledged that he is also a master of the Gothic, whose synthesis of the beautiful and the horrific invests his fiction with a delayed but unforgettable urgency.After reviewing Pater's status in recent scholarship and defining ‘Gothic,’ ‘Dark Aesthete’ considers the kinds and instances of Gothic writing in his short stories, Marius the Epicurean, and unfinished novel Gaston de Latour (1889, revised text 1995). The essay elucidates the absent, ghost-like father-surrogate whose ‘half-hostile’ attitude leads to the tragic death or suffering of a blameless son, thereby providing the intersection of autobiography and Gothic literary tradition in these texts