Gothic Elements

Question 1

What are some gothic motifs?

Answer 1

Use of strange places, clashing periods/places, differences in power, doubt and terror VS horror

Question 2

Explain use of strange places?

Answer 2

• Usual for characters in Gothic fiction to find themselves in a strange place
• Often threatening or violent, sometimes sexually enticing, often a prison
• Decaying mansion just down the road

Question 3

Explain use of doubt?

Answer 3

• A world of doubt, particularly doubt about the supernatural and the spiritual.
• Create in our minds the possibility that there may be things beyond human power, reason and knowledge but is accompanied by uncertainty
• Exaggerated interest in the supernatural and the constant possibility that even very astonishing things will turn out to be explicable.
• Uncertainty in Gothic is very characteristic of a world which orthodox religious belief is waning
• Intended to give us the experience of the sublime, to shock us out of the limits of our everyday lives with the possibility of things beyond reason and explanation, in the shape of awesome and terrifying characters, and inexplicable and profound events.
• Sublime experiences, by contrast – the kind we get for example from being on a high mountain in a great storm – are excessive ones, in which we encounter the mighty, the terrible and the awesome.

Question 4

Explain use of clashing periods/places?

Answer 4

• Gothics often take place at moments of transition (between the medieval period and the Renaissance, for example)
• A strong opposition (but also a mysterious affinity) in the Gothic between the very modern and the ancient or archaic
• Everything that characters and readers thinks that they’ve safely left behind comes back with a vengeance.
• Full of such uncanny effects

Question 5

Explain use of differences in power?

Answer 5

• Fascinated by violent differences in power
• Stories are full of constraint, entrapment and forced actions.
• Scenes of extreme threat and isolation – either physical or psychological – are always happening or about to happen
• Cursed, obscene or satanic, they seem able to break norms, laws and taboos at will.
• Sexual difference is thus at the heart of the Gothic, and its plots are often driven by the exploration of questions of sexual desire, pleasure, power and pain.
• Freedom that much realistic fiction does not, to speak about the erotic, particularly illegitimate or transgressive sexuality, and is full of same-sex desire, perversion, obsession, voyeurism and sexual violence.

Question 6

Explain use of terror VS horror?

Answer 6

• Terror could be morally uplifting. It does not show horrific things explicitly but only suggests them. This ‘expands the soul’ of the readers and helps them to be more alert to the possibility of things beyond their everyday life and understanding.
• Terror, which can be morally good, characterises the former; horror, which is morally bad, the latter.
• Horror ‘freezes and nearly annihilates’ the senses of its readers because it shows atrocious things too explicitly. This is morally dangerous and produces the wrong kind of excitement in the reader.