Critic Quotes - Bloody Chamber and Dracula

DRACULA - Vampirism and female sexuality

"Vampirism and female lust are synonymous" - Ray Cluely

DRACULA - Gothic archetypes and the female vampires

"Epitome of the femme fatale" - Ray Cluely

TEK - confusion in women complicit in their own dominance

"the two competing desires for freedom and engulfment" - Aidan Day

LOTHOL - The soldier's love

"the soldier provides a desexualised love, a love characterised by pure sympathy and empathy" - Tucker

DRACULA - Daughters of decedance

"Male writers tended to cast the New Woman as either a sexual predator or as an oversensitive intellectual unable to accept her nature as a sexual being" - Showalter

CARTER - passive case

"To be the object of desire is to be defined in the passive case. To exist in the passive case is to die in the passive case - that is, to be killed. This is the moral of the fairy tale about the perfect woman" - Carter

DRACULA - reflects fin de siecle fears

"Real life sociopolitical horrors" - Auerback

DRACULA - women as victims

"Stoker's women fall into two classes, victims and survivors" - David Gates

DRACULA - psychodynamic freud ideas

"Dracula is the embodiment of an unleashed id" - Les Daniels

DRACULA - religion

"He blurs the line between man and God by daring to partake of immortal life" - David Punter

TSC - pronography

"Calls the Snow Child "a masculine fantasy" - Bacchilega

DRACULA - occidental tourist guy

"the fear that what has been represented as the "civilised" world is on the point of being colonised by primitive forces" - Stephen Arata

DRACULA - catalyst

"He functions as the catalyst for transgression in others" - Byron

CARTER - latent

"I was taking the latent content of those traditional stories and using that; and the latent content is violently sexual."- Carter

CARTER - comment on Marquis De Sade in the Sadaeian woman

"His refusal to see female sexuality in relation to its reproductive function" - Carter

TCOW - subversion of sexual dominance in men and women

'Lambhood and tigerishness may be found in either gender" - Atwood

CARTER - the function of the Bloody Chamber

"destabilising the figure of woman as a purely passive object of the male gaze" Rebecca Wood

DRACULA - Blood transfusion was a moment of

"gang rape" - Elaine Showwalter

DRACULA - Stoker and the new woman

"Stoker uses the character of Lucy to attack the concept of the New Woman" - Greg Buzwell

GOTHIC - Gothic fictions seems to...

"promote vice and violence, giving free reign to selfish ambitions and sexual desires" Fred Botting

FF ARCHETYPE - describes women in the fin de siècle as…

‘inhabitants of a …wild zone outside of patriarchal culture’ Elaine Showalter

NEW WOMAN DRACULA - acknowledging both Lucy and Mina are NW

In the paper ‘The Daughters of Decadence’ Elaine Showalter describes how ‘male writers tended to cast the NW as either a sexual predator or as an over sensitive intellectual, unable to accept her nature as a sexual being’

RATIONALITY - rationality within Gothic

‘associated with wildness, Gothic signifies an over-abundance of imaginative frenzy, untamed by reason’ Fred Botting

DRACULA - through the picture of Dorian Gray ideas of degeneration were explored

Gothicism changed drastically as time progressed, with ‘notions of decadence and degeneration’ David Punter

FEAR - he says the central mood of gothic is fear as entertainment

‘we read gothic literature as escapism, we scare ourselves as entertainment’ David Punter

CARTER - feminist subversions of gothic

Carter constantly subverts gothic elements to explore female sexuality, as seen in her book ‘Loves of Lady Purple’. She also works in a sub-genre of gothic called Female Gothic; a term coined by Ellen Moers