Gothic Conventions - Frankenstein Flashcards
Ominous Atmosphere/Setting:
Isolated, darkness, the unknown (laboratories a key setting in ‘Frankenstein’).
Weather will also reflect the atmosphere: most commonly mist, fog, lightning, thunder. (Pathetic Fallacy).
The Supernatural:
Creatures of another world. Unattainable, outside of nature, but may have a natural cause.
The Doppelganger:
A double to depict the vices of each of the two characters. E.g: the Creature and Frankenstein.
The Taboo:
Characters often punished for engaging in the taboo. E.g: murder, grave-robbing, mutilation, etc (all crimes Victor is guilty of).
Extreme Emotion:
Mary Shelley challenges the notion that women are ‘hysterical’ by using the emotion to fit Victor.
Feelings of fear, panic, terror, hysteria, etc.
Prophecy/Omen/Foreshadowing:
Impending doom/evil is foreshadowed by symbolic animals, weather, comments, etc.
The ‘Noble Savage’:
A literary stock character who embodies the concept of the ‘outsider’ who has not been “corrupted” by civilisation. Without civilisation humans are essentially good; it is civilisation that makes them act in bad ways. E.g: the Creature.
Realism:
Verisimilitude.
Symbolic Settings:
Settings and atmospheres that often symbolise/represent a character’s feelings, thoughts, etc, or can foreshadow an event.
Over-reacher:
Typical in Gothic literature. Someone who breaks (transgresses) moral and social boundaries in the pursuit of forbidden knowledge.
Themes of madness, death, decay, mystery, obscurity, illness, insanity, hubris:
The Uncanny:
A warped, distorted human. We recognise some level of humanity in them but they are deformed. Look human but recognise something sinister: the humanity makes them more unnerving.
Epistolary form:
A part of the narrative is told through letters.
Frame Narrative
Frankenstein has multiple narratives: Walton, Victor and the Creature. This leads to bias as we cannot trust any of them: unreliable narrators.
Walton’s story frames the narrative
The Sublime:
Can either be overwhelmingly terrifying or overwhelmingly restorative.
Makes us feel insignificant/small in either a relieving or panic-inducing way.
Cannot connect to something = it has no sublime power over us.
