Gothic setting Flashcards
1
Q
Characteristics of Gothic architecture:
A
- Arches
- Vaults
- Flying buttresses
- Narrow spires
- Stained glass windows
- Intricate traceries
- Upward movement
2
Q
The Castle of Otranto
A
- Secret passages
For escape and imprisonment
3
Q
Dracula’s castle
A
- Personify his characteristics: remoteness, inaccessability
4
Q
The Ruin:
A
- Partially ruined castle / abbey
- Symbolic decay / dissolution / death
- Ghosts, passages, secret doorways
- Destruction
- Loss of a woman’s chastity
5
Q
The Cave
A
- ‘wild man’
- Suspense
- Visiting caves popular in Gothic + Romantic period
- Underworld / gate to the underworld
- Freudian terms –> return to the womb / fears and terrors associated with childbirth
- Connected to passages
6
Q
The catafalque / bier
A
- Bier allows unburied person to lie in state
- Reanimation possible.
- Shadow of Ashlydyat –> shadow of bier foreshadows doom of the whole family
- The Monk –> heroine wakes in a bier
- Association with sexuality –> Lucy in Dracula
7
Q
Flickering candle / lamp
A
- Light and darkness binary opposites
- Uncertainty / nervousness
- Gothic heroines are contemptuous of fear induced by flickering lights
8
Q
The Locked Room
A
- Symbolise the womb
- Mystery and secrecy –> lock relies on person with key.
- Gothic heroines curious about contents of locked room.
9
Q
The Mysterious Document
A
- Plot device
- Letters and diaries move Gothic plot –> alternate perspectives
- Clues
10
Q
The Portrait
A
- The Monk (anti-heroine has a portrait of herself to seduce eponymous abbot)
11
Q
The mask
A
- Disguise / deception
- Gothic villains wear masks –> disguise intentions
- Lucy’s transformed face described like a mask
12
Q
Churchyards and cemeteries
A
- Vaults and graves
- Death
13
Q
Magic
A
- Uncanny and supernatural –> all the paraphernalia of magic is gothic
- Witches and wizards feature in Early-Gothic texts –> The Monk magic is used to seduce Antonia
- Cauldron (Macbeth) picked up by Post-Gothic writers like Angela Carter
- Double symbolism of womb and supernatural join in caldrons
14
Q
Ghosts
A
- Ambivalence
- ‘real’ ghosts vs imaginary
- Udolpho imagined Ghosts have rational explanations (1794)
