memory context

(paralysis/avoidance)

• The Mysteries of Udolpho (Ann Radcliffe 1794) - Emily’s confinement produces paralytic dread, gothic tradition Stoker inherits

(paralysis/avoidance)

• Toni Morrison’s essay ‘The Site of Memory’ - slavery forced a collective suppression of traumatic memory

• 1860s/70s/80s Reconstruction - physically freed but psychologically imprisoned

(the past in the physical? present)

• Camilla (1872) + Nosferatu - similar expression of vampiric age in physicality

• Criminal Man (Lombroso 1876) - physiognomy

(the past in the physical? present)

• boom in psychoanalysis - ‘Lieux de mémoire’ (Nora 1984) argues certain spaces become repositories of collective memory when living memory fails - ongoing memory of slavery

(colonisation vs defence of time)

• ‘Eastern question’ Drac represents - seen as a continued threat to European political and economic security/integrity

• context of Irish colonial anxiety - fear of ‘reverse colonisation’ by the Irish (Stoker born in 1847 during the Great Famine), question about whose past determines the future?

(colonisation vs defence of time)

• 1873 setting in Reconstruction America - promise of freedom threatened by white violence (000s lynchings) and Black Codes, past of slavery difficult to ‘keep at bay’

• The Should of Black Folk (Du Bois 1903) - ‘double consciousness’

(setting as a gatekeeper for the past)

• Gothic Revival Architecture - the ‘Battle of the Styles’, cultural debate abt whether preserving old structures was noble heritage or dangerous archaism

(setting as a gatekeeper for the past)

• Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (1845) - describes how plantation’s beautiful landscape masked its horror

• Morrison’s interviews - spoke of a ‘national amnesia’

• sycamore trees - often used as lynching sites

(engaging with the past/memory to understand the present)

• Camilla (Le Fans 1872) - aristocratic undead trope established

• ‘old family’ - play-on-words re noble or ancient?

• concerns of past in context of recent scientific discovery

(engaging with the past/memory to understand the present)

• Freud’s ideas about trauma cycles - repetition compulsion, need to understand past to know present

• WPA Slave Narratives (1930s) - act of testimony, a cultural movement towards ‘laying it all down’

(form and narrative structure)

• Victorian Print culture boom (mid 1800s) - newspapers, telegrams, phonograph, records, form is a media archaeology of the time

(form and narrative structure)

• The Sound and the Fury (Faulkner 1929) - Morrison acknowledge Faulker’s influence on her, fractures chronology to represent traumatised consciousness

• influenced by rise of modernists in earlier 20th C - Woolf and Joyce’s stream of consciousness, Beloved can be considered a postmodern text in its application of the technique to content of slavery

(visions/irrational connection)

• Jean-Martin Charcot’s hypnosis experiments at the Salpêtrière hospital Paris - hypnosis used on hysterical women patients (links female susceptibility to trance states w pathology)

• The Society for Psychical Research (founded 1882) - serious institution investigating telepathy, hypnosis etc

(visions/irrational connection)

• context of the Middle Passage - 3-4 months transfer from west African ports to Caribbean/Southern States, slaves were chained and mortality high

• Morrison writing ‘village literature’ - antelope evokes fable and oral tradition/imagery