horror (trauma / violence)

Mina’s ‘white nightdress was smeared with blood’ during Drac Attack (sexual assault - bodily fluids)

Sethe ‘those boys came in there and took my milk’ (sexual assault - bodily fluids)

‘the pointed teeth, the bloodstained, voluptuous mouth’ - Lucy (supernaturally possessed into cannibalism)

considers herself ‘like a snake, all jaws and hungry’ when first spots Amy (possessed by desperation becomes cannibalistic)

Harker’s fear of wolves (animals) ‘red jaws, with champing teeth, and their blunt-clawed feet’ + Drac ‘more like a wild beast than a man’ (enemy dehumanised)

horror in Beloved is that enacted by humans - slaves ‘rented, loaned out, bought up, brought back, stored up, mortgaged, won, stolen or seized’ (slaves dehumanised)

Drac’s ’white sharp teeth, behind the full lips of the blood-dripping mouth, champed together like those of a wild beast’ (horror of what evil character does)

Sethe ‘one day she saw red baby blood, another day the pink gravestone chips, and that was the last of it’ (horror of what evil has brought good character to do)

JH warned by innkeeper’s wife that ‘tonight, when the clock strikes midnight, all the evil things in the world will have full sway’ (horror/terror based on superstition)

Paul D turned his neck ‘as much as the rope that connected his neck to the axle of the buckboard allowed’ (horror based on reality of chain gangs)

‘a vast ruined castle, from whose tall black windows came no ray of light’ (horror of something dead)

124 is ‘palsied by the baby’s fury at having its throat cut’ (horror of something ~alive)

‘a wicked desire that they would kiss me with those red lips’ (horror in Drac largely supernatural or sexual)

Sethe’s slave life had ‘busted her legs, back, head, eyes, hands, kidneys, womb and tongue’ (horror also physical, not just sexual)

‘we all went through the flames; and the happiness’ ‘is, we think, well worth the pain we endured’ + ‘our boy’ (hopes - fulfilled)

Baby Suggs ‘the only grace they could have was the grace they could imagine’ vs ‘there was no grace - imaginary or real, and no sunlit dance in a clearing could change that’ (hopes - dashed)