Gothic critics COPY Flashcards
“house of degradation,
even of decomposition.” (Baldick)
(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)
“Duplicity is an essential part
of existence in late-Victorian society” (Mighall)
“render woman as automata,
puppets and femmes fatale.” (Wisker)
Staking etc. “obsessive sadistic substitutes
for sexual gratification” (Hindle)
Dracula “anxiously defends the social, political and sexual ideas of
conservative, middle-class, masculinist ideology” (Mohr)
Pain and terror are “capable
of producing delight” (Burke)
Carter challenges male authorship of horror, and seeks
to redefine the gothic genre entirely rather than simply subvert it (Jowett)
Gothic revival time of “deep and
sustained religious revival” (Luckhurst)
“threatening, sexually rapacious
masculine world in which women are trapped and persecuted.” (Bunten)
“The gothic tradition… grandly ignores
the value systems of our institutions” (Carter)
In Carter’s tales “it is women who become
active and saviours, not the men” (Makinen)
“In much early Gothic fiction, darkness is
the locus of torment” (Cavallaro)
Evidence of a “pattern of
suppressed guilt” (Mighall)
Flight into occult is “a reaction to the predominance of science” representing
“a search for faith” (Buzwell)
The genre employs “frequent insistence
on horrific detail” (Stevens)
The “sexual implications” of Arthur’s murder of Lucy are
“embarrassingly clear”, even “gang rape” (Showalter)
“[Urban Gothic] narratives as sprawling and labyrinthine
as the districts which they haunt.” (Mighall)
“the individual’s
anxiety of becoming subject to forces beyond its control” (March-Russell)
“Mina is afforded far more freedoms than Lucy because
she does not give in to pleasure” (Polonsky)
“the death of a beautiful woman” is
the “most poetical topic in the world” (Poe)
“Lucy becomes a voluptuous,
unnatural parody of the New Woman as sexual decadent” (Buzwell)
The gothic contains “a collection of popular prejudices’ towards Roman Catholicism,
including “Idolatry” and “indoctrination” (Stevens)
