Gothic Critics/Context

Sue Chaplin

Sue Chaplin

• Gothic was not taken seriously because it was “perceived to be read by women” and therefore considered to be “inferior literary mode” in comparison to the “higher intellectual aspirations of the Romantic movement”

• Believes people grew tired of Radcliffean terror

Mary Shelley

Frankenstein, 1818

Horace Walpole

Castle of Otranto, 1764

Oscar Wilde

The Picture of Dorian Gray, 1890

Edgar Allen Poe

A Tell-Tale Heart, 1843

The Raven, 1845

Stevenson

The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, 1886

John Polidori

The Vampyre: A Tale, 1819

Le Fanu

Camilla, 1872

Ann Radcliffe

Believed terror was more powerful than horror

Walter Scott

The reader “feels tricked” by Radcliffe’s insistence of rational explanation

Matthew Lewis

The Monk, 1796

Far more focused on horror than terror

Ray Cluley

Dracula is “the ultimate patriarchal fantasy”

Andrés Roméro Jódar

The characters in Dracula are constantly suffering from delusion

Shakespeare

Jonathan alludes to Hamlet, foreshadowing his own brain fever.

Lucy feels bad for “poor Desdemona”, but Arthur’s actions of killing her draws a parallel between them. Arthur takes on the role of Othello.

Bradshaw’s Guide

Railway timetables published annually between 1839 and 1861

Jean Martin Chacot

French Neurologist

Arminius Vambery

Hungarian historian

The Manchester Gazette on Dracula

“A touch of the mysterious, the terrible or the supernatural is infinitely more effective and credible”

Arthur Conan Doyle on Dracula

“it is the very best story of diablerie which I have read for many years”

Robert McCrum

“resonates more than a century later”

Emily Carmichael

Lucy and Mina “exemplify the ideal of Victorian womanhood”. Lucy is the “emotional and domesticated view of women”, and Mina is “sensible and devoted to God and her husband”. Both “represent the merging phenomenon known as the ‘New Woman’.”

Joan Acocella

• The epistolary genre allows for a “multiplicity of voices”

• ‘Dracula’ reflects the “real-life sociopolitical horrors” the Victorians were facing

• Romanticism and John Polidori inveted the suave, aristocratic vampire - such as in ‘The Vampyre: A Tale’ (1819)

Pete Bunten

• Castles reflect the “hypocrisy of the religious community” in ‘The Monk’ (1796)

• In ‘Dracula’ the safety of the castle is an allusion, it’s description provides an “eerie foreshadowing” of what’s to come.

• In ‘The Bloody Chamber’ and ‘Dracula’ the Damsel in Distress trope is reversed.

• If locked doors reflect female sexual vulnerability then this applies to Jonathan Harker too.

• In ‘The Bloody Chamber’ the castle is an example of “irresistible masculine power”

Greg Buzwell

• The emphasis placed on “pursuing new sensations” gave rise to the New Woman.

• The New Woman was “a cultural phenomenon” - in literature she would address concerns such as feminism, women’s suffrage, pre-marital sex and pregnancy.

• New Women were presented as a “sexual predator or as an over-sensitive intellectual”

• Lucy is a New Woman, she is a “voluptuous, unnatural parody” and a “sexual decadent”

• Mina is far more traditional, perhaps Stoker’s preference for women during this period.

David Punter

• Max Nordau’s ‘Degeneration’ gave rise to the fear of de-evolution.

• Dracula is presented as “the Anti-Christ”, the opposite of English protestant values, who’s redemption is a “perverted, predatory form of the afterlife”.

• Dracula represents the past, and is ultimately defeated by modernity.

• Stoker’s epistolary format goes “against the oral culture of the vampire”.

• There also appears to be anti-individualism, the characters only defeat Dracula by working together.

• The threat of returning to an earlier age is never fully eradicated.

Victoria Leslie

• Sexual desire is a form of transgression in ‘Dracula’

• Female sexuality may have been more terrifying to a 19th century audience than vampires - Dracula’s brides are sexually liberated.

• Dracula creates a sense of sexual desire in others.

• Castles are a place of transgression and otherness.

• Jonathan’s journal acts as a confession, and Mina acts as a Priest by reading it.

• ‘The Bloody Chamber’ is in reference to the mother’s womb and the maternal bond between mother and child.

• Transgression leads to a metamorphosis through sexual awakening, from girlhood to womanhood.

• Female curiosity in often punished.

• Carter wants to change fairy stories in order to empower young women and girls.

Alice Reeve-Tucker on TLotHoL

• The Countess is a sympathetic character whose condition has been forced upon her by her ancestors.

• The Countess wishes to form connections with others but her animalistic, vampiric instincts prevent her from doing so.

• The Countess and the caged lark reflect one another, she is entrapped in the castle and by her condition.

• The expectation that men are sexually interested in her feeds her desire to live an “imitation of life”.

• The soldier views her with tenderness and pity, wanting to protect her rather than take advantage of her.

• The young man shows maternal instincts towards her.

• The Countess in death is free from the life she loathed and fully human.

• It reinforces the limited options women have in Gothic literature.

• The horror of the story is the knowledge that the soldier will be sent off the the front lines of the war and may not survive.

Jamieson Ridenhour

• There was a “geographical relocation” to the Gothic, from the isolated, foreign castles in Walpole, Radcliffe and Lewis to the English countryside of the Brontë’s in the early 19th century.

• Similarly, the “urban-dwelling nineteenth century British readership” gave rise to Dickens and Reynold.

• London as the largest and oldest urban space gave rise to plenty of obscurity.

• Poor living conditions, due to pollution and lack of sanitation, led to disease and homelessness.

• Crimes thrived out of necessity, such as theft, opium trafficking and fraud.

• 20,000 thieves and 80,000 prostitutes.

• Even “civilised” societies had an “uncivilised” side.

Of Wolves and Men BBC Documentary

• Angela Carter was “the baby of her family” and therfore treated like “a doll” by her mother.

• She married Paul Carter, she wanted to salvage this marriage but only built “a better and stronger cage for myself”.

• The Magic Toyshop was written whilst she was married, Phillip supposedly represents an elevated version of Paul.

• She worked as a hostess in Japan, viewing it as a place of “anarchy and desire” in the 1970s.

• ‘The Sadeian Woman’ is nonfiction focused on De Sade about female sexuality and agency.

• ‘The Bloody Chamber Collection’ is written in the voice of her grandmother

• ‘A Night at the Circus’

Edmund Burke

A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757)

H.P Lovecraft

The Outsider (1926)