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)
In Castle Dracula “the occult and rational
work in harmony” (Holden)
“unconscious as a deep repository of repressed
memories or impulses”(Hogle)
(Carter’s work features women) “who grab
their own sexuality and fight back” (Gamble)
Gothic heroine “cowering
little piece of proprietary” (Moers)
“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)
“The fight to destroy Dracula and restore Mina to her purity is
a fight for control over women”
Wasserman
The Gothic “mutates
to reflect the times in which it lives” (Buzwell)
There is a set of dichotomies between “the institutional
and the profane” in Gothic novels (Green)
Dracula = “imperial
Gothic” (Brantlinger)
“mesmerism and occult largely emanate
from the margins of the imperial centre” (Wynne)
“Stoker’s fiction reflects the tension between
science, mesmerism and the occult” (Wynne)
Carter had an “intensely
visual imagination” (Simpson)
“Strangeness lies within
as much as without” (Botting)
“an often subversive
reworking of the Romantic aesthetic” (Chaplin)
The Gothic developed as an “intersection of religious belief,
aesthetic taste and political inclination” (Botting)
“The heroines of these stories are struggling out of the straightjackets
of history and ideology and biological essentialism.” (Simpson)
“it is more the emotional crisis of the protagonist
that generates narrative momentum” (Chaplin)
Beauty is “ the virginal
object of barter” (Byrant)
(Harker is the only character who is) “an object of the vampire’s seduction and
an agent of his destruction” (Kuzmanovic)
”pleasure belongs to the eater,
not the eaten.” (Atwood)
Harker’s wielding of the kukri is a “symbolic castration
of his enemy to regain his lost virility” (Frost)
Girl in the werewolf “less concerned with sexuality
than with survival” (Simpson)
“The gothic put many of its participants back
in touch with the supernatural” , “powerful undercurrent of belief” (Stevens)
[epistolary novels, for example] “gives it a greater sensational immediacy
…and authenticity” (Mighall)
“the Victorians entertained an increasing fear
of reversed imperialism” (Bartel)
Dracula is a “ powerful authority figure
who has few restraints” (Holte)
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)
“embrace the practices
usually termed occult” (Bloom)
“Terror was akin to the sense of wonderment
and awe accompanying religious experience.” (Botting)
“there exists a Dracula
within us all” (Carter)
“elevates superstition
over the reasoned and ordinary religious focus” upheld by most of Stoker’s characters (Newcomb)
Dracula titillates readers with “fears of the repressed
and the occult” (Jann)
The Enlightenment’s “scientific and technological innovation” had made it
“comparatively ‘safe’ to indulge in irrational fantasies”
Stevens
Horror “eschewed the subtleties of the technique of terror,
preferring to revel in graphic depictions of violence” (Chaplin)
