Gothic Literature Flashcards
FREUD’S OEDIPAL CONFLICT
The Anglo-European-American Gothic has contributed to Freud’s notion of Oedipal conflict in middle class families, as it often features some “son” who wants to kill and also be the father in a mix of guilt and desire, or a heroine who wants to appease but also to be free from the patriarchy, like Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre. Behind these contradictions lies a fear of the Gothic readers: that the ruination of the older powers will haunt them all with chaos and death. There is this idea (which may not be explicit) that by breaking up this old foundation a new world can be built.
HYPERBOLIC VERBALIZATION OF FEARS AND DESIRES
The hyperbolic verbalization of these fears and desires through a blatantly fictional style is an important element in the Gothic that remains consistent even through the transformations of the western society. In the case of Frankestein, many of the hero’s dilemmas come from changes in different areas of science and the industrial revolution that caused the mechanization of life, the rise of a homeless urban working class and the confrontation of the racial others that they wish to keep away but they also depend on economically. The intermixed transitions of this era, those blurry lines, were represented by the half-alive/half-dead, organic/artificial, contradicting elements that are conveyed by a certain creature that embodies our longings and fears in a way that makes them seem like they are threatening us in the present but also a relic of the past or an element of the future. The fact that the hopes and fears are represented sort of metaphorically allow the audience to decide if they want to face the implications or avoid them.
SYMBOLIC MECHANISMS
Something that allowed the Gothic to last for so long are its symbolic mechanisms, especially its haunting and frightening specters, through which we can cast anomalies of the present over onto strange spaces or creatures. It takes our contradictions and projects them onto the unreal, the alien, the ancient, the grotesque. This happens in Frankenstein or Dracula, for example, which we tell over and over again and we focus on a different element each time but some things remain constant.
THE UNCANNY
The strange and ghostly figures serve as examples for Freud’s description of “the Uncanny”, the deeply and internally familiar that appears to us in seemingly external and unfamiliar forms. According to him, what is most familiar are the psychological and visceral drives from our earliest existence, although the figures can also represent social contradictions of the white middle class.
The therapist Julia Kristeva continues on this line in her book Powers of Horror. She talks about the return of the repressed familiar in “the uncanny” based on a fundamental human impulse. For her, these ghosts are products of “abjection”, in the sense that we “throw off” all that is ambiguous and in-between in ourselves, the inconsistencies that prevent us from forming a coherent identity. The prime example of this “in-between” is the moment when we’re alive but we also don’t exist yet, this is the moment of birth, which lies at the base of our beings and keeps calling us back. The figure onto which we abject our fears and desires is criminalized or condemned by people in authority to enforce social norms.
By the way, this symbolic “abjection” is not only found in books. The Gothic is an important part of western fiction-making and it appears also in films and videos like Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” where there’s a confrontation with sanctioned identities that is both fearful and attractive.
PLACE OF MIXTURE
A reason why the Gothic symbolizes abjection so well is that it’s a place of intertwining of different elements. Of high culture and low culture, of two kinds of romance (according to Walpole), one oriented towards the old aristocracy and one oriented towards the middle class. So he chose the label as a marketing device to express that it was going to be a marriage of the so-called “high culture” genres like the epic and the tragedy with “low culture” genres like superstitious folklore. The resulting works featured traditional signs of identity that were adapted to the ever-changing capitalist society (like Clara Reeve → The Old English Baron). It’s been regarded as an oxymoronic, class-mixing style and it causes, to this day, a lot of debate [over its blurring of metaphysical, natural, religious, class, economic, marketing, generic, stylistic, and moral lines]. And this debate has affected how both Gothic and counter-Gothic writers incorporate the features that we’ve been talking about into their work.
THE FEAR OF THE MIDDLE CLASS
One of the principal subjects is how the middle class deals with the two extremes that they fear: the decadent aristocracy and the low, deviant working class. And both of these extremes are abjected, like we’ve mentioned, into figures like Lewis’s Monk Ambrosio, Stevenson’s Mr. Hyde, Wilde’s Dorian Gray, Stoker’s Count Dracula and Leroux’s “Opera Ghost”.
- So, to conclude, the controversy surrounding the Gothic has to do with the mixing of “serious” and “popular” and the clash of identities, of levels of discourse and of opposed conditions like life/death and ancient/modern, all of which is abjected into the otherly creatures.
