The Theme of Death in the Novels of Anna Mostowska and Łucja Rautenstrauchowa

In the gothic novel in the late 18th and early 19th centuries scary death scenes were very common.
The writers from the period usually described the scenes of death in a very naturalistic way. Some of them
probably wanted to implement Edmund Burke’s theory, according to which the fear of death is the most
intensive expression of terror. We must experience it in order to be able to know the feeling of sublimity.
The subject of my thesis is the writing of Anna Mostowska and Łucja Rautenstrauchowa. The first of
them was the one who introduced the gothic novel as a new genre at the end of the 18th century. There
have been analyzed the scenes of death occurring in their novels. Even though they were full of irrational,
fantastic elements already announcing Romanticism, yet they had their origin in the Enlightenment. The
following pictures of death are connected with the tendency to moralization and didacticism. In accordance
with the rules, the good people are rewarded, and the bad ones are punished with unexpected death, that is
often caused either by the influence of supernatural forces or by the realization of a prophecy.