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Themes
Religion
Taboo/ Forbidden
Family/ Motherhood
The Supernatural
The Other
Transgression/ Overreacher/ Forbidden Knowledge
Setting
The Hero-Villain
Presentation of women
Isolation
Entrapment
Doppelgangers
Marriage/ Sexuality
Class/Social Order
The liminal
Death
Persecution
Revenge
Metamorphosis
Insanity
Ambiguity and Uncertainty
Oppositions
The Past
Horror/ Terror
The Sublime
Innocence
Supernatural
Anne Radcliffe = first writer to popularise the concept of the “explained supernatural”
represents the introduction of supernatural elements to create a vivid psychological sense of terror → these elements are being rooted in the mundane by the end of the story
to criticise this work for a sense of “cheap dissolution” would arguably detract from the terror that Radcliffe created → not despite the mundane, but because of it
the tangibility of such stories creates a sense of terror in her writing → often her work featured patriarchal and entrapping elements → typical of the female Gothic → to “terrifying marginalisation” and entrapment of women where the terror persisted
Isolation → loneliness
The Lady and the House of Love
protagonist is trapped in her Carpathian chateau in a “system of repetition”
portrays the “tenuous bride” as a contrast to Watson as Carter more emphasises their isolation due to their domesticity
her loneliness is rescued by the young soldier’s “kiss” → also restores her humanity yet leaves her “next day his regiment embarked on France”
abrupt ending → typical of fairy tale genre → comments on women only being saved by masculine attention as she is ultimately left alone
femme fatale archetype is used as part of Carter;s “archaeological investigation of gender representation” (Morrison)
Isolation → loneliness
Walton is perfect romantic archetype → in his voyage into the country of “eternal light”
epistolary form = literal representation of his “outside” status as he confides in his sister Margret “I have no friends” “I have no wish to ally myself to the radicals” → could assume Shelley is condemning rather than praising such excessive behaviour
Walton’s intellectual doppelganger (VF) seems to save him from loneliness but further advise him to be more cautious in divine aspiration and knowledge → Shelley’s moral is clear
Isolation → Setting
The Courtship of Mr Lyon
Beauty has a more opened mind towards the ‘isolated figure’ of Mr Lyon
Carter is influenced by Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal → the beast due to being an ‘outsider’ can only imagine an ‘ideal’ where he is capable of being loved and accepted
explicit references →speaker mediates between the ‘spleen’ and the ‘ideal’ through intimacy and physical contact with a female → here it is beauty
“he buried his head in her lap”
Beast adopts same melancholy world view as Baudelaire’s speaker because of his outsider status → can only lead to disappointment
however Carter employs a cliche to save the dying lover → a young girl saves Beast → ends in transformation “claws withdrew into their pads”
suggests that by recognising the animal’s nature in both humans and animals, society will be capable of acceptance (unlike treatment of the creature)
Isolation → Setting
creature is the most marginalised figure
in his narrative he expresses his life being “alone” → metaphor of him being an “outsider” to the Delacy Household = exclusion
Constantly alone and wandering the earth → “like the wandering jew” who was cursed with immortality → Monster finds no human acceptance from humans
exaggerated by Victor as he ‘turned’ from him moments after he had reached the ‘accomplishment’ of his ‘toils’ → neglect steers the tone for the rest of the novel → Creature is constantly ‘abhorred’ and rejected by society
Outsider linked to philosophical debates of the contemporary time
John Locke’s critical essay (Shelley read it) concerning humans using external appearance to determine the nature of a being → sympathy for the creature
Ignorant tendency Locke wrote about seen in Victor → in his final narrative “soul as devilish as his form” → reader is sympathetic towards the creature as we know of his internal benevolence
Francis Bacon’s novum organum (Shelley probably read it) → gave a privileged place for irregularity in nature
Monster views himself as “other” → detrimental to those around him
Marxist reading → creature = agent of social change → represents the “proletariat” he is alienated from his fellow workers and humanity due to otherness →starts his revenge and destruction of the traditional socilect as the “other”
reader endure’s creature’s pain most ardently during his narrative when he exclaims “I have no property and no worth”
cast allusions to 1960’s psychoanylitic view of the “mirror stage” in which a child can become aware of themselves
In Frankenstein → recognition of himself as a monster → ironic self-fufulling prophecy → creature turns into one
Isolation →Mental
Wolf Alice
trapped in a liminal state → “not human” but not entirely “feral”
motif of a mirror to represent her disassociation with herself which is ‘restored’
“she knew she saw herself with it” → sense of self is renewed
unlike Victor as “the wood around her” began to take form with her increased self awareness
COML
Mr Lyon becomes dependent on on Beauty → indicative of otherness → has no agency to leave → lead to deterioration of his character
Isolation → Mental
Victor spirals into decline → “the beauty of the dream vanished”
madness and exhaustion prevalent throughout the gothic novel conveys how far removed his is from his initial vision → “life and death appeared to me in ideal bounds”
embodies Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner → feels guilt and isolation for his transgression → becoming mentally unhinged
Elizabeth’s kiss turns into the “corpse” of his “dead mother”
Psychoanalytical reading = suppressed fear of sexuality
Shock → Context
Carter was a prominent 2nd wave feminist
Primary goal was to establish women on the same social level as men in a patriarchal society that had subjugated them for centuries
the emancipation of women were shocking in the 1970s
Frankenstein and Northerner Abbey → feminist criticism was heavily retained
The intensity of which Carter conveys her beliefs is shocking
The Snow Child
Shocking → Count rapes the dead body of a child
Shortest tale in the collection → lack of emotion or sentimentality provided by the third person narrator → emphasises the shocking brutality
shows in simple terms the terrifying power of the patriarchal society over women → where a man can rape a young woman with no consequences
symbolic of wider mistreatment → "child is “the child of his desire” conveys most men objectify women and change is required
Shock → Context
Shelley → born of the turn of the 19th century → exported dramatic scientific advancements between her birth and the publication of Frankenstein 1818
Industrial revolution transformed industry in Britain and Galvani were conducting great experiments in electricity and re-animation → written during a religiously dramatic society → thus would have been shocking
Victor transgresses and plays God → Modern Prometheus
Frankenstein abuses science to pursue “the secrets of life and death” until theyre “laid out before him”
the creation of the creation is a grave sin and an affront to God in the eyes of most contemporary readers → yet as Shelley highlights many had no issue with the rampant speed of technology that was replacing human labour
Supernatural → women
Angela Carter drew from Anne Radcliffe’s “explained supernatural” → many of her retelling of fairy tales incorporating supernatural elements to create vivid creations of the marginalised position of women in a patriarchal society
Not the supernatural elements which are terrifying but the “latent content” (Carter) she has extracted from the tales
The Bloody Chamber
Tale stemming from Bluebeard’s Castle
Carter remakes the tales supernatural elements, obsessing instead with the Marqui’s sadistic tendencies
Tale seeks to utilise the traditional archetypes of an innocent and virginal woman and a tyrannical male figure
Carter demonstrates the terror in the mundane → the manner in which the protagonist is treated as an object for sexual gratification rather than as a human
“He looked at his familiar treat with heavy appetite” → Carter seeks to satirise what she refers to as “the unquestionable country of marriage”
Clear Carter mock the patriarchal state of marriage in the late 20th century → women are almost coerced into subservience
Arguably it is the symbolically vivid and compelling tale of marriage that runs through this story which dispels the need for any supernatural
Carter suggests that the mistreatment of women at the hands of a patriarchal society is fear inducing enough that her titular story requires no supernatural elements
Supernatural → women
Frankenstein has a subtext of the injustice women in a patriarchal society → suggests that “domestic affection” is key to the tale
No family has a maternal figure and thus on a level could be what critics calls “a critique of a birth without women”
Stems from Shelley’s misfortune in her attempts to become a mother → she had three miscarriages before she wrote Frankenstein
Then when the increasing prominence of galvanism (hypothesised to be able to reincarnate the dead) → she has trick in a nightmare about creation of life without a woman
Story seems to indicate a patriarchal society trying to remake the natural power of women for birth → replacing with it instead with a ‘monster’
Tale thus reads not as a supernatural tale but one which highlights the increasing marginalisation of women → becomes clear as we are given 3 major narratives all relaying a male viewpoint → often fixated on the Faustian desire or knowledge of Walton and Victor that makes both characters self-confessed “slaves of passion”
The reader is cast as female → can see the pain of female characters as they are denied the agency to achieve their own ambitions
Embodied by the transition from Shelley;s 1818 to 1831 version of Frankenstein → original and radical version was diminished for a less patriarchal reading by Percy Shelley
Elizabeth’s ambitions are remade and her more explicit condemnations of society → “the executioners, their hands yet breaking with the blood of innocence, believe they have done a great deed” → Shelley’s work is thus a critique of the treatment of women in a patriarchal society → seen through the trial of innocent Justine who was quickly condemned by society
The patriarchal world of men, female voices are ineffectual → ironically made in the reducing of female reading of Frankenstein
Supernatural → society
Wolf Alice
The supernatural elements of the tale are not the ones which incite horror → instead society’s prejudice is made barbaric
Links to Frankenstein’s creature → “the barbarity of man”
The wolves and the duke cares for her (supernatural creatures) → humanity savagely disregards her → “the nuns roused her with sticks”
Religion is even cited as savagely human → complete odds to the submersive campaign of the supernatural
Stems from Carter’s second wave feminism and utilises the female Gothic to highlight the injustice of humanity
Supernatural elements are largely allegorical or satirical → to ironise our perception of the su;pposedly savage beasts in comparison to the truly monstrous humans in the tales
Arguably ultimately the supernatural in this mockery does not go far enough to aid the role of women in the patriarchal society
The Bloody Chamber
The protagonist never changes from that of an “innocent victim” → her introduction of her mother as a “wild thing” does not displace the feelings of Diane Aoeleler → the female Gothic is ‘victim feminism”
Supernatural → society
whilst supernatural elements can be extremely impactful in the gothic → not always due to explicit supernatural horror → because of what they represent and satirise
Vijay Mishra claimed that Frankenstein is a tale of “excessive duplication and reduplication of dreamlike regressions”
Ties to gothic doubling of Victor and Creature → at the end of the tale they seem slaves to their passions and desires
Many reject the existence of the monster at all citing the monster as a “Freudian symbol of victors repressed desires”
For example Victor's desire to escape the tyranny of his family “I was so guided by a Silken Court” led him to attempt to escape from them through his work.
equally his evident fear of sexuality when he first dreamt of Elizabeth leads to her death on his wedding night witnessed by no one but him → could therefore be argued that victors warped mental state “do you share my madness” is emulated in his final narrative
the monster could Simply be a projection of Victor's repressed fears and insecurities
The shadow vector sees upon Mount Blanc assumed to be the creature could instead be created by a geological phenomenon known as the Brocken spectre → creating a larger than a life shadow of Victor himself
Victor's tragedy is of his own faustian nature rather than his creature’s design
Transgression
Whilst Carter also conveys extreme transgressive desires, the wishes are not hubristric, but rather, detrimental to those that must suffer from it
The Snow Child
child created from desires of husband “a girl as red as blood” and “as black as a feather”
mother nature is implicit in providing the Count’s upmost wishes as she created a “child of his desire” → Castle of Otranto
Carter confronts reader with ambiguity as she juxtaposes the innocence of a child to the desires of a man → taboo
Similarly with F the reader is confronted with moral dilemma (not for protagonist)
Children = lack agency and innocent → vulnerable and dependent on Count
Carter commenting on the patriarchal standard perpetuated by men that women are vulnerable and dependent by men, sentiments inspired by 2nd wave feminism which was prevalent at the time
Transgression
Victor’s hubristic desires are ostensibly altruistic → wishes to “penetrate into the recesses of nature” “secrets of heaven and earth that I wished to learn”
as a gothic protagonist and tragic hero Victor is fraught by his harmatia → desire to transgress nature through his ambition
Modern Prometheus = also intended to usurp “heaven and earth” as a means to achieve glory
Shelley’s intentions → Victor’s extreme desire to usurp God will inevitably fail as it did for Prometheus → foreshadows victor’s demise
ambition = cautionary tale warning of dangers which could be cast into society by presuming oneself above God
Mirrors social beliefs → period of unprecedented discovery and galvanism → bringing people back to life → act which defies nature
Victor left “confined to his bed” as a consequence of of hubristic desire
creature left him as a shadow of the Faustian and “slave of passion" man he once was
further implements Shelley’s ideals that one cannot transgress God or they will suffer the consequences
Revenge
Carter does so to transgress social norms
The Tiger’s Bride
girl feels like a “doll” as she does not recognise herself → feminist lens = patriarchal society simaltaneously idealises and reduces women
at the end of fairytale → protagonsit displays angency and enacts revenge on the patriarchal society that she is used to sucumbing to → transformed into beast with “shinning hairs” → Carter → sex is reclaimed as a collaborative act of creation as opposed to objectification
under the rule of her father she had no identity → pushes back on patriarchal standard she is now free
Carter herself lived in an abusive marriage which she struggled to escape
Carter provides them with agency that she wishes she had as a means to push back on societal norms
Revenge
Reactionary
revenge presented to convey the change in monster in an attempt to become less “other”
duality of creature’s emotions “life is dear to me" […] and i will defend it” → eloquence and not a vengeful creature
Contrasts to when to when creature is denied a “mate” → eloquence and rationality fades → he will “glut the man to death”
extreme feelings of revenge is indicative of what the creature is denied as opposed to the creature himself
John Locke essay on Human understanding → there are no innate principles in the mind and the mind is a blank slate → Shelley comments that the monster was not inherently vengeful but rather a relfection of Victor’s immediate rejection → “turned” once “accomplished” his “toils”
Religion → corrupted
Wolf Alice
Villainy → patriarchal opressor
The Bloody Chamber
Carter explores the desire of the patriarchal villain through the obsessive and disturbing focus on female sexuality and violence
The primitive element of masculinity is also explored in the titular story of The Bloody Chamber as the marquee is described as having a pure silver dark main of souls of velvet
In Carters writing any regression to primitive Instincts isn't Condemned but celebrated → allows for even the villains primitive Instincts to be explored without the fear of the reprial
The desire of villains is essential in the gothic as elements of their behaviour may resonate with the reader as Punter suggested that “the gothic emerges from the depth of our psyche”
Patriarchal villains and body the fear of female impression which beginning to be challenged during the 1970s
The Marquis animalistic elements are enticing
the external Facade of this villain is therefore a reflection of his inner character as he exposes both the desirability a version of taboo as a theme making him fascinating to the gothic
Villainy → reflection of villain’s character
Villainy → reflection of villain’s character
The Bloody Chamber
Carter indicates the pitfalls of humanity due to its obsession with blame evil and villainy as “the devil as real as you or I”
Rather than evil resonating in the other or the uncanny the dark realities of villainy is that it resonates in humanity and in society as explored in the werewolf
The Werewolf
Through the grandmother of the story is a supernatural due to her “wolf paw” → The perversity of humanity and the girl who “prospered” are the true source of villainy
The corruption in humanity was explored through Reeve Tucker who suggests it is “the human ability to behave monstrously” → This is revealed through the brutal treatment of the old woman as they “beat her old carcass”
This form of villainy is perhaps the most threatening as it is inescapable and very real → It does not exist in the pages of novels or in the depth of the human mind but it is ever present in the society which we live → mundane
Villainy → female villains
Lady and the House of Love
The most fascinating villains in the gothic are female such as the Countess in the lady of the House of Love
Per character has been corrupted by a form of patriarchy → “ancestral crimes” → She has a thirst for blood but she embodies an alternative villain that is both horrifying and deserving of pity
The oppression of women in the gothic was revealed in countless gothic text such as the Castle of Otranto as “the innocent victim was almost exclusively female” [kidd]
Carter utilises female villain to present women as active rather than submissive →Villainy is presented as the countess desires were “fresh meat” as she “drops down on all fours”
Although the countess does not desire to take on a villainous role as “the blood on the Countess is cheeks will be mixed with tears” she embodies both victim and villain → Carter therefore is the literary mouthpiece for the second wave of feminism and she writes back to patriarchy through her characters that reject the notion of merely Madonna or whore instead they are allowed to represent female liberation and can determine their own identities rather than obey the laws written by men → countess becomes a l liminal identity
Innocence
Male innocence
The Lady and the House of Love
Hero of the story similar to fairy tale prince → subverts patriarchal notions of a fairytale
Soldier has “blonde hair, blue eyes” and a “special virgin quality” → acts as protection against the Countess
he acts paternally, does not have sex, sucks the blood from her thumb → contrasts to the other male characters in the text as he does not want her for sex
Robin Ann Sheets → has lead to Gothic hero who are virtuous in a society which has “eroticised dominant men”
Seen similarly by Jean Yves (blind piano man TBC)
Does not fit with society’s stereotypical man
Innocence
Femme fatale
The Snow Child
Countess = femme fatal
“black foxes pelts” = hunter
“knee high black boots with a scarlet heel” = scarlet in the gothic → link between violence and sexuality
This characterisation contrasts with the Snow Child
name suggests innocence and purity
“child” → demonstrates the taboo nature → she is the object of the Count’s lust→ Castle of Otranto
As the child become more desired than the Countess she becomes “naked”
women’s sexuality is a form of protection → by not being desired she becomes vulnerable
explains why the child has to die for the Countess to thrive
“rose” → symbolic of love and sexuality romance etc
“bite” → an inherent darkness of which the Snow Child is too pure to understand ( a man’s lust is deadly to a woman → can be corrupted)
Child’s death is blamed on the Countess
“bloodstain” → representative of her virginity and innocence
“forced kill” → Countess is a hunter
a critic denounces her as a “pseudo feminist” → women indulge in their sexuality → goes against third wave message
Religion → oppresive nature of religion
The Bloody Chamber
“Like Eve […] I had done as he had wanted”
The theme of temptation and the consequences of female curiosity are arguably central to the short story, as the female protagonist gives in, much like Eve to temptation in the pursuit of knowledge, the forbidden bloody chamber could symbolise the forbidden tree of knowledge.
A feminist may condemn this religious story as an attempt to keep females in perpetual ignorance and therefore perpetually inferior to males
a Marxist may interpret the notion of denying knowledge as keeping those inferior ignorant to the elite’s exploitation so as not to destabilise their position and cause a revolt if their practices were revealed.
Note 
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