Supernatural: Both Texts Flashcards
supernatural in beloved
Characters are haunted by the past, the choices made, by tree branches growing on backs, by infanticide, by slavery.
· Who is Beloved? - Supernatural succubus, vampire (sucks the soul, heart and mind of her mother ) or real person?
· Beloved domination over Sethe- physical embodiment of the spiteful poltergeist, strangles Sethe.
· No character remembers what Beloved has said. (epilogue) idea that she only said and thought what they themselves were thinking. (p.274)- Reincarnation of Sethe’s sense of guilt and unforgiving memory.
· Beloved emerges from water in Ohio River. Sethe has no wish to die on the “bloody side of the Ohio river”. Foreshadows the supernatural part. - When seethe first sees Beloved she experiences an artificial delivery.
· How characters react to it:
Paul D - drives the ghost out. Describes her as “a room-and-board witch”
· Tree symbolises: that the past has attached itself to her but the haunting of it has not stopped growing.
· vampire or parasitic aspect of motherhood is amplified. Fetus is a parasite to the mother whose uterus it is sucking life from and continues to nourish its body by gleaning the nutrients from the mother’s body after birth by nursing; Beloved is the supernatural representation of that. Beloved takes on the bodily form of a pregnant woman though she may be likened to a mosquito that has swelled with a host’s blood.
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supernatural in dorian gray
Sibyl’s comment “I have grown sick of shadows” -curse
· Basil: “a dream of form in days of thoughts” - alluding to idea to educated Victorians: “Theory of Forms”. This states that earthly life is filled with imperfect copies of a divine reality and that the perfect “form” - exists in another plane.
· Elements of the supernatural: the painting which changes showing Dorian’s sins and evildoings, the use of mirrors, and direct and indirect references to selling one’s soul to the devil.
· the painting changes,: supernatural definition : Any experience, occurrence, manifestation or object that is beyond the laws of nature and science and whose understanding may be said to lie with religion, magic or the mystical”
The painting gets progressively more horrible throughout the story, to portray an awful decay.
· “They say he has sold himself to the devil for a pretty face” and Basil Hall ward in viewing the painting the night Dorian killed him: “Christ! What a thing I must have worshipped! It has the eyes of a devil”
· End: Dorian dies and his dead body is old and wrinkled, and the picture recovers it’s old state magically.
· Dorian to reflect whether ‘some strange poisonous germ crept from body to body till it had reached his own?’ (ch. 11).
context of the supernatural in dorian gray
Sibyl described as a “narcissus”- rejecting the love of all others, including the nymph Echo, was transformed into a white flower after dying of love for his own image in a pool.
Paintings often play a sinister role in Gothic fiction. The first Gothic novel, Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764) includes a figure stepping from a painting and into reality while Melmoth the Wanderer (1820), written by Oscar Wilde’s great-uncle Charles Maturin, describes the haunting gaze of a portrait as it follows the viewer around a room.
