Gothic critics Flashcards
“Lucy becomes a voluptuous,
unnatural parody of the New Woman as sexual decadent” (Buzwell)
(argues that Stoker is a feminist as) “The novel (Dracula) falls clearly into two parts,
each half centered around a different kind of woman.” (Demetrakopolous)
“The fight to destroy Dracula and restore Mina to her purity is
a fight for control over women”
Wasserman
(Carter’s work features women) “who grab
their own sexuality and fight back” (Gamble)
(Harker is the only character who is) “an object of the vampire’s seduction and
an agent of his destruction” (Kuzmanovic)
Dracula is a “ powerful authority figure
who has few restraints” (Holte)
“Mina is afforded far more freedoms than Lucy because
she does not give in to pleasure” (Polonsky)
Staking etc. “obsessive sadistic substitutes
for sexual gratification” (Hindle)
“In many Gothic novels the castle represents a threatening,
sexually rapacious masculine world in which women are trapped and persecuted.” (Bunten)
Gothic heroine”a whimpering, trembling, cowering
little piece of proprietary” (Moers)
Beauty is “ the virginal
object of barter” (Byrant)
“render woman as automata,
puppets and femmes fatale.” (Wisker)
”pleasure belongs to the eater,
not the eaten.” (Atwood)
“The heroines of these stories are struggling out of the straightjackets
of history and ideology and biological essentialism.” (Simpson)
In Carter’s tales “it is women who become
active and saviours, not the men” (Makinen)
Girl in the werewolf “less concerned with sexuality
than with survival” (Simpson)
Harker’s wielding of the kukri is a “symbolic castration
of his enemy to regain his lost virility” (Frost)
The “sexual implications” of Arthur’s murder of Lucy are
“embarrassingly clear”, even “gang rape” (Showalter)
“the death of a beautiful woman” is
the “most poetical topic in the world” (Poe)
Dracula “anxiously defends the social, political and sexual ideas of
conservative, middle-class, masculinist ideology” (Mohr)
There is a set of dichotomies between “the institutional
and the profane” in Gothic novels (Green)
Dracula titillates readers with “fears of the repressed
and the occult” (Jann)
Flight into occult is “a reaction to the predominance of science” representing
“a search for faith” (Buzwell)
Harker’s diary is a means of “repose” against madness and the dissolution of the self
Attempts hermeneutics to achieve some mastery over the world (Holden)
In Castle Dracula “the occult and rational
work in harmony” (Holden)
Dracula = “imperial
Gothic” (Brantlinger)
“the Victorians entertained an increasing fear
of reversed imperialism” (Bartel)
“The Gothic castle or house is not just an old and sinister building ;
it is a house of degradation, even of decomposition.” (Baldick)
“In much early Gothic fiction, darkness is the locus of torment,
punishment, mystery, corruption and insanity.” (Cavallaro)
“[Urban Gothic] narratives as sprawling and labyrinthine
as the districts which they haunt.” (Mighall)
“The Gothic imagination turns upon a fear of object, in particular the individual’s
anxiety of becoming subject to forces beyond its control” (March-Russell)
“The gothic put many of its participants back
in touch with the supernatural” , “powerful undercurrent of belief” (Stevens)
“embrace the practices
usually termed occult” (Bloom)
“an infusion of the sacramental and the supernatural that elevates superstition
over the reasoned and ordinary religious focus” upheld by most of Stoker’s characters (Newcomb)
“Stoker’s fiction reflects the tension between
science, mesmerism and the occult” (Wynne)
[epistolary novels, for example] “gives it a greater sensational immediacy
…and authenticity” (Mighall)
“it is more the emotional crisis of the protagonist
that generates narrative momentum” (Chaplin)
The Enlightenment’s “scientific and technological innovation” had made it
“comparatively ‘safe’ to indulge in irrational fantasies”
Stevens
The gothic contains “a collection of popular prejudices’ towards Roman Catholicism,
including “Idolatry” and “indoctrination” (Stevens)
“mesmerism and occult largely emanate
from the margins of the imperial centre” (Wynne)
Gothic revival time of “deep and
sustained religious revival” (Luckhurst)
“an often subversive
reworking of the Romantic aesthetic” (Chaplin)
“Terror was akin to the sense of wonderment
and awe accompanying religious experience.” (Botting)
Horror “eschewed the subtleties of the technique of terror,
preferring to revel in graphic depictions of violence” (Chaplin)
The genre employs “frequent insistence
on horrific detail” (Stevens)
Carter challenges male authorship of horror, and seeks
to redefine the gothic genre entirely rather than simply subvert it (Jowett)
Pain and terror are “capable
of producing delight” (Burke)
Evidence of a “pattern of
suppressed guilt” (Mighall)
“Strangeness lies within
as much as without” (Botting)
“unconscious as a deep repository of repressed
memories or impulses, the archaic underworld of the self”(Hogle)
The Gothic developed as an “intersection of religious belief,
aesthetic taste and political inclination” (Botting)
“Duplicity is an essential part
of existence in late-Victorian society” (Mighall)
“The gothic tradition… grandly ignores
the value systems of our institutions” (Carter)
Carter had an “intensely
visual imagination” (Simpson)
The Gothic “mutates
to reflect the times in which it lives” (Buzwell)
“there exists a Dracula
within us all” (Carter)
“at the heart of the Gothic text
is the tension provided by the possible violation of innocence” (Kidd)
“scandalous challenge to socially
normative constructions of the individual” (Holden)
