ENG LIT - The Gothic: Literary Context

What was the folio text Carter wrote along with TBC?

• The Sadeian Woman

• Took inspiration from Marquis de Sade’s work on pornography

• Found his work “liberating” as it challenges patriarchal notions of sex and femininity

• She calls him a “moral pornographer”

How does LOTHOL parody Dracula?

• Countess is a vampire and also blood thirsty

• She eats animals, not humans making her more humane

• Both her and drac want to be human/ accepted but is more explicit in TBC

• Her villainy is more explicitly sexual

• Soldier sucks her blood rather than her doing so

• She becomes mortal before dying

• Carter, through the soldier, encourages us to fear real things like war rather than superficial horror hence her parody of Gothic settings

Which fairy tale inspired the titular story?

• Bluebeard by Charles Perrault

• Subverts the hero, making it the mother instead of the brother

• The choker of rubies symbolises her escape from death rather than simply a symbol of victimhood

• The marquis is stereotypically attractive and is of the accepted upper class, thus his villainy is harder to detect and “masked”

• The protagonist seems to want the sexual encounter before realising its dangers

How was Carter influenced by post-modernism?

• Was a movement that avoided absolute truths

• Popular in 50’ and 60’s

• Post-modernist writers often used fragmentation, irony and short stories to confuse their readers and make the moral unclear

• A result of war and conflict, people didn’t think anyone could find true “meaning”

What did the term “Gothic” refer to initially?

• The barbarian tribes of northern Europe who were believed to have ruined the Roman Empire as it was associated with reason and order and they were savage and brutal

• Seen in the Szgany in Drac, in Mr Hyde’s savage behaviour and in the monster in Frankenstein

• Correlates with ideas about the other - this is where the Gothic derives its fear from

What happened in the 1740s regarding architecture?

• People started designing homes looking like medieval castles and Gothic ruins

• Eg: Strawberry Hill House where Horace Walpole lived and had a dream that initiated his writing of “The Castle of Otranto” in 1764

• It established some key features of the early gothic eg: Supernatural, weak female heroine, mystery and the isolated castle, set in Italy

• His use of the supernatural would be seen as hyperbolic today

What id the Gothic’s fascination with Catholicism?

• Many writers eg: Walpole and Radcliffe set their novels in Italy as it was associated with Catholicism

• Since reformation 16th cent, England was Protestant and saw Catholics as barbarous, rebellious and dangerous

• This separated the people of England from the fearsome acts of Orientals, reinforced ideas of Orientalism

What happened to the popularity of the Gothic in the 18th cent?

• It rose as literature became more accessible and people became more literate due to the Enlightenment

• Things such as the French Revolution invoked violence and this was reflected in the violent imagery used in the Gothic that was largely for entertainment

What was Anne Radcliffe known for?

• The explained supernatural

• This is where ghosts etc is later explained as being from earthly sources

• She also doesn’t show terror explicitly but rather builds narrative suspense and uses power of suggestion/delay

• She makes distinction between horror and terror

How did Radcliffe explain horror and terror?

Terror = uncertainty and obscurity of the sublime

Horror = explicit violence

What was the Monk about? Why was it significant?

• Written 1796 by Matthew Lewis

• Uses explicit sexual violence and borders on pornographic material

• Includes incest, murder and pacts with the Devil

What does Radcliffe’s The Italian respond to and how?

• She responds to The Monk

• Uses Catholic Italy to explore how ancient values such as superstition threaten the modern

• She rejects Lewis’ explicit use of terror

Who came up with the idea of the sublime? what is it?

• Edmund Burke 1757

• Connected with things that are vast, dark and not able to be fully comprehended

What was happening by the 1790’s to the Gothic genre?

• It had become formulaic, with a set of conventions ie trapped heroin, isolated settings and family secrets

• This was parodied by Austen in Northanger Abbey (1818)

What did Mary Shelley do differently in 1818 to those before her?

• Instead of looking to find terror in anti-Catholic sentiment she responded to recent issues on science and politics

• She was part of the Romantics who held that feeling and individual expression was hugely important

• Frankenstein has a thirst for knowledge and instead of running to a castle runs to his laboratory

What did the Romantics find of the Gothic?

Looked down on it as they believed in the importance of the relationship of the individual with nature and the Gothic focused on the supernatural

What key idea does Shelley explore in Frankenstein 1818?

• The other

• The creature is not inherently evil but acts evil due to the way society rejects him due to his hideous appearance

• These reflected political ideas of the other suggested by her parents, that monsters are created out of more monstrous socio-political structures

• She gives her monster a voice making us question what monstrosity means

What began to happen in the fin de siecle to the Gothic?

• Became more about intrusions into domestic spaces eg: Wuthering Heights

• Heathcliff acts as the other as he was foreign and violent and these attributes challenged Christian values and conformity - his antithesis is Mr Linton

Why was the fin de siecle integral to the Gothic?

• Marked a time of great uncertainty exposing new contemporary fears for writers to play on to illustrate terror

• Eg: Society and been continually improving intellectually but by 1880s some feared it would go back and decline

What key fear became popularised around the fin de siecle?

• Degenration as described by Nordau

• It removed the Gothic’s obsession with ruined castles and abbeys to the deterioration of the mind and body where the human becomes monstrous eg: Dorian or J&H

How did increasing urbanisation contribute to the Gothic?

• Cities lent itself to anonymity meaning people could uphold a pretence of respectability while doing monstrous activities behind closed doors

• Cultivated the notion of dual personality or the doppleganger

Give a text that explores the idea of the pluralism of the self

• Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891)

• Follows a man who is seduced by decadence and is manipulated to live a life of moral corruption

• He is able to keep up appearances as he physically does not show decline - instead the painting by Basil does

• Is an example of the uncanny whilst also being a criticism of the Aristocratic class that saw themselves as morally superior

Who coined the term “uncanny” and what is it?

• Freud 1919

• Suggests that which is both familiar and unfamiliar

• The Doppleganger is a form of this where there is a double of something, prompting anxiety

• Dorian’s painting, or Mr Hyde would be considered the doppleganer

What does the double become in Wilde’s novel?

• It becomes Dorian’s internal conscience

• If we biologise the building, he keeps the painting in the attic which acts as his mind that slowly deteriorates as he commits more and more immoral crimes that are largely hidden from society and even from the reader

How does Dracula also respond to fears of degeneration in the fin de siecle?

• Drac was a response to contemporary fears about immigration and how Britain was feeling threatened by reverse colonisation

• In biting his victims, he infects and invades modern England, threatening degenration into the primal state that he displays

How does Dracula subvert the traditions of the Early Gothic?

• 18th cent novels had used castles and abbeys for villains to occupy

• However here the human body is made into a space occupied by evil and supernatural forces

Who influenced Dracula’s physique?

• Lombroso’s theory of Atavism

• Said criminality is an inhereted trait and is evident in one’s physicality ie: big noses/ lips

What other transgressions does the fin de siecle gothic explore?

• Sexual transgressions

• ie: In Gray it is implied homosexuality which was illegal at the time and in Drac it’s sexual promiscuity from both Dracula himself but also the middle-class women like Lucy who is ultimately punished in death

How is Dracula fashionable as a Victorian Gothic?

• Is an epistolary novel

• Presents it as rational and scientific, enabling the reader to suspend their belief and go with the irrational tale

How does Dracula represent the liminal?

• He threatens modern England with his superstitious Eastern background but in entering it tries to assimilate

• He is part human part beast

• He is a member of the undead - transgresses boundary between life and death

What happened in the 20th cent to the Gothic?

• Post-modernism became popularised

• It questioned what he held as true and presented marginalised figures for rconsideration

• Eg: Carter’s TBC where she uses the excessive nature of the Gothic to break taboos

How does Carter subvert genre?

• She uses fairy tales we are familiar with to expose the truths behind these seemingly comfortable texts

• She offers multiple different perspectives on one fairy tale

• She juxtaposes a genre connoted with innocence with one connoted with violence

• Also subverts the role of heroines from ones of passivity to ones with agency eg the protag in the first story whose mother liberates her - in early gothic novels mothers were not so present

Which other text is part of the post-modern Gothic? What themes does it explore?

• The Wasp Factory - Ian Banks 1984

• Explores ideas of instability of identity

• Uses lots of dark humour as with Carter

• Is influenced by Frankenstein as the father of the protagonist attempts to assemble a mutilated body to form the body of his daughter

What did the Southern Gothic emerge from?

• In the 20th century, laws surrounding racial segregation and economic disadvantages for African Americans became the source of much social tension especially in the South

• In turn, the South became segregated from the rest of America that seemed to be more progressive and accepting of those of other ethnicities

Give an example of a Southern Gothic text and what themes it explores

• Light In August - Faulkner, 1932

• About a boy living in the south who is white but rumoured to be mixed race so struggles with a fractured sense of self

• He is accepted neither amongst the white nor black population and is therefore “othered” by all and made out to be a monster

What other common gothic trope does the Southern Gothic explore?

• Religion

• Eg: Outer Dark - Cormac McCarthy 1968

• The title is taken from Matthew’s Gospel where hell is described as a place of outer darkness

• Throughout the novel a sense of hell and apocalypse remains on the landscape of the horror in the American South

How does McCarthy both conform to and subvert typical gothic tropes?

• Uses the idea of spectres and the ghostly

• However his ghosts can commit very real acts of violence that are also very extreme

• The novel then becomes a full blown horror, riddled with murder and cannibalism

Which other Gothic texts explores the blurring of the natural and supernatural?

• Beloved - Toni Morrison, 1987

• Tells the story of a mother who was enslaved, and who felt forced to bury her child instead of returning her to a life of slavery

• Morrison gives voice to the other who is an African American

How does Morrison both conform to and subvert Gothic tropes?

• Uses ideas of the past such as ghosts

• However again we are unsure if she is real or not

• Uses flashbacks to disrupt the narrative, fragmented narrative voice, disturbing