Crtiical appreciation

Things to remember

Structure

• Chronological?

• Flashbacks?

• Cyclical narrative?

• Perspective?

• Shifts of focus onto what?

• Do we move at all through a time frame?

• When is new information revealed

• Does the writer use juxtaposition?

• Sudden or gradual introduction to a new character

• In then out or out then in

• Does the writer combine external actions with internal thoughts?

• Are some points developed/focused?

• Where are they key sentences positioned?

Things to remember

Analysis

• narrative voice

• setting

• imagery

• tone

• language techniques

• sentence moods/types

• phonology

Technique

Definition

heterodiegetic

not comparable) (literature, film) Of or relating to a narrator that does not take part in the plot.

Technique

Definition

Digetic narrator

a narrator who participates in the story, and possesses an active role.

Technique

Definition

Enumeratio

the device refers to making a point with long detail.

Technique

Definition

Prolepsis/ analepsis

• Prolepsis, flashforwards.

• Analepsis, flashbackwards.

Technique

Definition

Epizeuxis

repeats one word for emphasis.

Technique

Definition

hermeneutic code and proairetic code

Ronald Bathes 'hermeneutic code', evoking mystery, and 'proairetic code', building action and suspense.

Technique

Narrative voice

Third person

third person

heterodiegetic

provokes a sense of mystery as the reader must create bonds with the characters in the novel as opposed to a narrator.

foreboding as the supernatural activity from the story is not seen by the reader from a single character's point of view, but more of an overhead narrator; the reader gains a larger view of the story with a more enigmatic interpretation as we do not know who this narrator is.

Omniscient -> more eerie and unattainably larger than life.

The unknown narrator is a familiar pattern from the gothic narrative and in this case portrays the \[insert character\] as isolated and detached from the world, as we as the readers are detached from the characters themselves.

Technique

Narrative voice

First person

• First-person narration allows the reader to watch the story develop as the protagonist experiences it, which is effective in creating fear and emotion within the reader

• The reader is left feeling uncertain of the events which are being relayed to the narrator → Evokes the pity of the reader

• Gothic literature thrives on feelings of anxiety and weariness.

• Typical of the gothic → particularly Victorian ghost stories

• Used to be ambiguous → Charles Dickens “No. 1 Branch Line: The Signal-Man”

• Used so reader is given an in-depth experience of the happenings in which the protagonists are experiencing and in turn, a deeper take into the horror and terror in which the authors are trying to portray → Edward Bulwer Lytton’s “The Haunted and the Haunters”

• heightens the emotional experience of the reader as our emotions are based on their experiences (vicarious attachment) [can create an unreliable narrator]

Technique

Narrative voice

Unreliable narrator

• The reader is not meant to take the narrator at face value. They may be deliberately lying or their words may be influenced by unconscious bias or delusions.

• The Turn of the Screw by Henry James → 1898

• Tool can be used in the service of horror to build an unnerving sense of uncertainty in the mind of the reader.

• Edgar Allan Poe “The Tell-Tale Heart”

• Narrator begins by insisting to the reader that he is not mad, which only serves to convince you that he is The unreliability of the narrator is glaringly obvious and serves to reinforce the reader’s perception of his insanity.

Technique

Structure

• Progression of the sentence structure builds tension and fear, which are both Gothic tropes, as it reflects a naturalistic style of thought.

• This is exemplified through the extract starting with long clauses embedded in complex sentences

• The repetitive nature of the short sentences build tension through introducing deliberate dramatic pauses that break up the natural rhythm of the sentences → makes readers stop and reflect upon the action

• Repetition of clauses

• • Discontinuities/delays in the narrative →builds inner tension

• Shifts in voice → creates confusion

• Sentence lengths (short vs long for different effects)

• Convoluted or simple discourse (dialogue)

Technique

Definition

Complex sentences

A complex sentence is made up of a main clause and a subordinate clause connected to each other with a subordinating conjunction

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eg Because my pizza was cold, I put it in the microwave.

Technique

Chiasmus

'when the going gets tough, the tough gets going'

Technique

Voyeurism

voyeuristic on the taboo acts being explored in the text. I mentioned how this narrative form allowed for a chiaroscuro (clear contrast in light and dark) setting to be built, which is intrinsically Gothic

Technique

metonym

A word that is used to stand for something else that it has attributes of or is associated with.

calling your car your "ride" or declaring that lobster mac and cheese is your favorite "dish".

('heart' was used to describe intense emotions a few times I think)

Technique

dichotomy

I described how the 'lofty' girl, in her perverse sexual aggression (I linked to taboo, her use of imperatives) was similar to the femme-fatale/vampiric archetype.

Technique

Indirect speech

'Yes, it was a corpse' was striking because it presented itself seemingly as free indirect speech but was assigned to no character; I then went on to talk about the effect of this as establishing a connection with the reader, but also presents a sense of ambiguity and reader distrust of the narrative authority.

Gothic period

Early gothic

1700s/ 18th century

• Artistic and philosophical shift away from scientific rationalism with its emphasis on reason, rather than feeling/emotion

• Horace Walpole, Ann Radcliffe,

• Terror, excess, supernatural, imprisonment, Satanic bargaining, castles, forests, destruction, disruption, immorality, dread, irrational violence, women under threat, tyranny, patriarchal oppression, sexuality, corruption, medieval Catholicism, ghosts, demons ​

Gothic period

Romantic Era Gothic

Late 1700s-early 1800s

• A way of exploring accepted boundaries and social conventions

• Mary Shelley, ​

• Charles Maturin

• The sublime, sensibility, prioritising of emotion over reason, tyranny, position of women, horror, terror, awe, vengeance, violence, justice, injustice, multiple narrators, boundaries and limits, dreams ​

• Human institutions and restrictions seen as source of evil; emphasis on emotion over reason; imagination as powerful force; emphasis on the self and individual experience ​

• Mid 1700s onwards-Scientific experiments such as Galvanism, exploring the origins of life ​

• Internal vs external

• Women under threat

• “Occupies the Romantic Gothic sub-genre”

Gothic period

Victorian Gothic

1800s/19th century

• aspects of Gothic incorporated into domestic novel and detective fiction

• Brontë Sisters,​ Charles Dickens, Edgar Allen Poe

• Civilisation and savagery, opposites, transformation, otherness, anxiety, class, race and gender difference, psychological complexity, origins, sensationalism, doubles

Gothic period

Fin de Siecle

1880s - early 1900s

• End of century texts responding to emerging evolutionary, social and medical theories

• Oscar Wilde, Bram Stoker

• Doubling, degeneration, decadence, amorality, mutation, psychological landscapes, doubt, scepticism, criminology, fantasy, the New Woman, duality, ​perversity, the monstrous, fear of immigration

Gothic period

American gothic

1900s-present

Southern Gothic emerges as a genre - using Gothic to explore personal and social trauma arising from the legacy of slavery and civil war

Edgar Allen Poe, William Faulkner

rationality versus the irrational, puritanism, guilt, the uncanny (das unheimliche), ab-humans, ghosts, and monsters.

Puritan imagery, particularly that of Hell

The dark and nightmarish visions the Puritan culture of condemnation, reinforced by shame and guilt,

abhuman - evolution

Social context link of how American Gothic extracted the dark potentials latent in the individual suggested by Romanticism

Gothic period

Modern British Gothic

1900s - present

• Often a response to social and cultural contexts, and ​sometimes ​subversive

• Daphne du Maurier, Angela Carter,

• Dislocation, persecution, confinement, grotesque, subversion, transgression, role-reversal, gender, adolescence, Oedipal conflict, instability, anxiety, otherness, dystopia  ​

Gothic period

Imperial Gothic

late nineteenth-century

Imperial Gothic saw the revival of Gothic tropes such as inexplicable curses, demonic possession and ghostly visitations - inspired by the social anxiety of society transgressing into barbarism, a lapse into fears of Occultism and Spiritualism.

Setting

Notes

• Metaphors + personification etc. → atmosphere of dread

• Visibility + darkness → obscurity of danger

• Stressing the physicality of the environment with violent/powerful imagery

• Manifestation of the character's feelings

• The setting becomes a metonymy/reflection of inner thoughts

• Everything mirrors something => rhetoric of binaries/contrasts

Setting is alive

• The Picture of Dorian Grey by Oscar Wilde

  • When Dorian is running away, the setting is personified

  • e.g. the shadows, the moon

• Dracula by Bram Stoker

  • the sea is personified

  • the lately gassy sea was like a roaring devouring monster

Setting

Sublime

sublime setting relates to the figures of the women and establishes a sense of the different spheres of society, the tamed and the untamed. I compared it with Frankenstein and The Castle of Otranto. 'Allusions to prostitition'

Setting

Entrapment

• evoking feelings of claustrophobia within the reader and making them feel helpless and surrounded by the setting.

• make readers feel overwhelmed and unsettled → Wuthering Heights in which the narrator stumbles lost through a snow filled landscape and with them the reader feels both trapped and overwhelmed by the scenario created by the setting.

• 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.

Setting

Castle

• 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.

• 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

Gothic trope

Gothic Sublimity

The Gothic Sublimity creates an image of awe, an awful sense of beauty. Creating terror in opening the mind to its own hidden and irrational powers.

Gothic trope

Gothic Paradoxes

A paradox in literature refers to the use of concepts or ideas that are contradictory to one another, yet, when placed together hold significant value on several levels.

'The apparent delight with which we dwell upon objects of pure terror' (Aikin) in talks of the heart's paradox.

Gothic trope

Coleridge's willing suspension of disbelief

Suspension of disbelief, sometimes called willing suspension of disbelief, is the avoidance of critical thinking or logic in examining something unreal or impossible in reality

• The Woman in Black by Susan Hill - when the narrator feels the presence of someone in the house, he thinks that it might be someone living in the nursery

• Beloved by Toni Morrison - there is both a supernatural and prosaic explanation of the presence of an abusive ghost in the house

Gothic trope

The Numinous Dread

Defined by Rudolph Otto, the numinous dread exudes 'absolute unapproachability, power and urgency, and a force which is most easily perceived as the wrath of God'.

Relatable to Wells' 'The Red Room' (1896) as "the shadows seemed to take another step" personifying the setting and building the presence of MYSTERIUM DREMENDUM.

Gothic trope

taboo

taboo and linked the extreme and disturbing nature of the acts being quasi-supernatural (almost) in the dramatic psychological states they represent, which I linked to Faulkner's 'A Rose for Emily'

I linked this to how there was a semantic field of the supernatural prevalent throughout the extract, but no literal instances of it.

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**Opposite Taboos**

Refers to key concepts within the Gothic such as: sanity/madness; wild/domesticated; male/female; living/dead; past/present; reason/passion; dark/light; good/evil.

In the Gothic genre these are often put under pressure any may be shown to collapse, showing they are not quite so rigidly different as we might have believed.​

Gothic trope

Dreams

• Waking up from a dream = reminiscent of Johnathan’s Harpers travel to Castle Dracula

• Uncertainty is conveyed throughout the gothic genre through the the binary opposition of dreams vs reality

• Rationalising dreams = must have seen something supernatural

• Casts doubts in the reliability of the narrator

• Night creates the foundation of a deeply eerie atmosphere

• Carmilla’ by Lefanu the dream Laura has signifies entrapment in as she cannot escape the dream symbolising the unconscious and the supernatural element that prevails throughout Gothic Literature.

• Freud → dreams represent repressed desire and emotions that gradually build and form an expression of wish fulfilment.

• The Monk by Gregory Lewis

  • Anotinia's mother came to the chamber because she saw her daughter calling out for her to save her in a dream

Gothic trope

the abject

Refers to that which was once human but is no longer. It threatens us because we recognise in it our own mortality.

To confront a human corpse, something that should be alive but isn't, for example, is to confront the reality that we are capable of dying ourselves.

This repulsion from death, excrement and rot threatens the subject and the natural order of things.

Gothic trope

Uncanny

• Defined in Freudian terms as a sense of fear and familiarity

• Persona recognises their terror but struggles to define its origin

• 'The Uncanny' locates a strangeness in the ordinary - coined by Sigmund Freud's 1919 essay on the subject.

Gothic trope

Death and decay

• Provokes sentiments of repulsion. When juxtaposed with beauty and youth could allude to the societal of human mortality → key element of the gothic = tap into contemporary repressed anxieties of the culture

• 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 20th century societies

Gothic trope

Darkness

• Often linked to gothic obscurity

• Failing light sources are indicative of the genre

• Aligns itself with the tension of the extract

• Suggestive of an unseen threat → potential danger

  • Prevents the reader from visualising the piece properly/ clearly → further implements threat of the unknown

• The Picture of Dorian Grey by Oscar Wilde

  • when he is trying to run away from the murder, he gets to a street where 'the gas lamps grew fewer and the streets more narrow'

• Woman in Black - the woman in black turns the lights off and the protagonist is alone in the darkness with the cries of the child and the presence of the woman

Gothic trope

Light

• Often juxtaposed with obscurity →  revealing chiarroscuro

• Light can be alluded to religion → “heaven”

Gothic trope

Obsurity

• 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

• Can provide a contrast to the 19th century obsession of knowledge (only use if written during the Victorian gothic.

• Often juxtaposed with light imagery → revealing chiaroscuro

• Obscurity is a key element of the experience of the sublime. It includes both physical and mental obscurity - darkness, fogginess, confusion and things not seen or understood clearly.

Gothic trope

Bifurcated Ideology

The possibility of contradictory moral behaviour, used in the Gothic to format characters of a distrustful nature. Relatable to Lewis' 'The Monk' (1796) features Ambrosio, a monk who defies Christianity as he commits crimes of rape and necromancy.

* the Monk is commonly described as 'lustful' and enchanted by Antonia's body \n - around his brutish desire to rape her

Gothic trope

The Revenant

• The revenant is a term used to describe the past, 'what comes back'. This might, for example, be an evil deed from the past for which retribution is now sought (the sins of the father) or a fear which we thought we had banished.

• The relevant includes ghosts, hauntings and the return of the unwanted, perhaps repressed, elements from the past.

Gothic trope

Religion

A prominent theme in the gothic as it examines the purpose and limitations of humanity, along with the suggestion of an ‘anti-christ’ → alluding to the idea of encroaching evil and uncertainty

• The Italian by Ann Radcliffe -

  • presence of the Holy Inquisition

• The Monk by Gregory Lewis

  • explores the corruption of religion in his society

  • satanic titillation, takes place in a monastery

  • use of religious setting heightens the tension between good and evil - often identifies the evil character with the devil

Gothic trope

Knowledge

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* The conquest for knowledge is often a long and complex journey and can be a form of terra incognita → entering an unexplored terrain, possibly resulting in psychological awakening
* Long complex sentences to describe setting and dark atmosphere can reflect the journey to enlightenment as it is a tiresome journey

Gothic trope

Terror vs Horror → Radcliffian

Terror

• The Gothic as a 'bifurcation into sentimental terror narratives and German-influenced tales of horror' (Wright). Radlciffean Terror characterised by Ann Radcliffe at the end of the eighteenth century, focused on building tension and an atmosphere of obscurity

• Used by Ann Radcliffe, it is primarily concerned with a greater psychological and intellectual response

  • Reflects the powerlessness of individuals in the face of more dominant forces - Common sources include grotesque, light/dark motifs, sublime settings etc. Horror

Horror

• Gothic's Horror uses images of the macabre, the taboo, evoking repulsion. 'Terror was an ubiquitous signifier for Gothic by the end of the eighteenth century' (Wright).

• Deals with alarmingly concrete imagery \n - A more physical response \n - Lurking force (personification) \n - Characters' inability to communicate their emotions \n - Loss of control

Characteristics

Tropes

**Byronic Hero / villain​,**

A proud, passionate and socially defiant rebel who harbors remorse over some past moral transgression. Polidori's (1819) 'The Vampyre' uses Lord Ruthven as a reflection on this archetype, portraying a cynical man, a monster.

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**Faustian Archetype**

A man that surrenders moral integrity in a bid to achieve power and pursue ambitions. Relatable to Beckford's 'The History of Caliph Vathek' (1782), where "Carathis \[was\] to obtain favour with the Powers of Darkness".

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Promethean Hero / Villain​, Satanic Hero / Villain​, The, Outsider​, Aristocratic​, The Ingenue​ Femme Fatale, Monstrous feminine​, Madwoman in the Attic​, Mad Scientist​ Sinister Servant, victim → vulnerable and easily intimidated

Characteristics

Protagonist

• some degree of tragic stature​, of high social rank,

• somehow foreshadowed by doom​, a tendency to be influenced by past events​,

• sharply contrasting qualities within the character​, the possession of considerable powers​,

• a striking physical presence​, a strongly sexual element​, driven by some all-consuming passion​,

• a connection with the exotic​, an occasional association with what is bestial or non-human

Gothic text

In Faulkner's "A Rose for Emily,"

Being a victim of male-dominated society and the conflict between the South and the North, Emily suffers from Stockholm syndrome and is tortured to death. On Emily's funeral, a rose for pity is sent to Emily.

Gothic text

Carmilla

I talked about how her beauty was perverted by being compared to that of the corpse, and how her characterisation was sensual yet disturbing, the inverse of Patmore's 'Angel of The House'.

I talked about how she was a juxtaposition to Edith, whom the reader may feel pathos for in her vulnerability.

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Carmilla → Sheridan Le Fanu

femme fatale

"She interested and won me, she was so beautiful and so indescribably engaging" --> seductive

Gothic text

Walpole's 'The Castle of Otranto' (1764)

The origin of Gothic Literature: initially playing with the realism of his story, Walpole demonstrated Gothic Horror, using 'subterraneous passages', images of the macabre and the taboo to evoke a perpetuous sense of repulsion.

Gothic text

Hills' 'The Woman in Black' (1983)

'Mad with grief and mad with anger and a desire for revenge.' The effect of the supernatural on the psyche, as well as themes of madness, cathartic characterisation - Gothic sublimity.

Gothic text

Doyle's 'Dead Man Talking' (2015)

Uses the modern Gothic themes of dislocation and instability with the narrator, Pat, saying 'There was no way I was dead, I had gone to the toilet \[...\]'; Doyle using satire to mock his narrator's ignorance.

Gothic text

Fuseli's 'The Nightmare' (1781) Painting

Gothic painting that many of writers allude to in order to reference themes of madness, dreams and the supernatural.

Gothic Text

Patmore Angel of the House

The Angel was passive and powerless, meek, charming, graceful, sympathetic, self-sacrificing, pious, and above all--pure

Gothic Text

AO5

Nicola Onyett

"Women who had been seduced or were living a life of sin [...] had passed the point of no return"