Gothic Critics

Gothic Critics

1. John McCrae

   • "The villain of the piece has to be fairly upper class"
   • The Gothic was "appealing to everyone who enjoyed a vicarious thrill" not just to women
   • "Ambiguities of reality are everywhere"
   • Dracula is "almost automatically cinematic"
   • "Wolves are deep in the psychology of Europe"
   • Gothic texts are "written by outsiders"
   • Dracula is the "personification of the undead"

2. Nick Groom

   • "The Gothic blurs the boundaries of the victim and perpetrator"
   • "Art is a way to keep the dead among us"
   • "Dorian becomes a vampire himself, feeding on sin"
   • The central question within the Gothic is "who, or what, am I?"
   • "There is a blurring between one's self and the other"
   • "The past is inescapable, and indissolubly linked to the present"
   • Dracula is "a novel that questions what it is to be human"
   • Female vampire "embodies a fear of non-heterosexual reproduction and the rejection of men"
   • The vampire "combines fears and fantasies of consumption"
   • Stoker "inverts the Eucharist"

3. Fred Botting

   • Gothic novels "adopt a cautionary stategy, warning of dangers of social and moral transgression in their darkest and most threatening form"
   • "Gothic signifies a writing of excess"
   • "Gothic landscapes are desolate, alienating and full of menace"
   • "The Castle gradually gave way to the old house: as both building and family line, it became the site where fear and anxieties returned in the present"
   • "In Gothic productions imagination and emotional effects exceed reason"
   • "Passion, excitement and sensation transgress social proprieties and moral laws"
   • "Exciting rather than informing, it chilled their blood, delighted their superstitious fancies"
   • "Gothic fictions seemed to promote vice and violence, giving free reign to selfish ambitions and sexual desires"

4. Clive Bloom

   • 'The Gothic speaks to the dark side of domestic fiction'

5. Robert Kidd

6. David Rogers

   • "Narratives constructed upon a clash between polar forces such as those of Good and Evil are as old as narrative itself"
   • Stoker is "pitting Dracula against a group of un-ambiguously 'manly' men whose qualities, actions and outlook seem to contrast him in virtually every way"
   • The men "in being accepted for what they are not, they become ironically aligned with their enemy"

7. Elaine Showalter

   • Fin de Siecle: "all the laws that governed sexual identity and behaviour seemed to be breaking down"

8. Gail Cunningham

   • The New Woman as: "a nervous type, often anorexic, a neurasthenic woman, prone to hysteria"
   • The New Woman as: "a highly sexual creature, whose permissiveness undermined social stability"

9. John Bowen

   • "The genre of Gothic is a particularly strange and perverse family of texts"
   • The strange place a protagonist finds themselves: "It is often threatening or violent, sometimes sexually enticing, often a prison"
   • "everything that characters and readers think that they’ve safely left behind comes back with a vengeance"
   • "Ghosts, like gothics, disrupt our sense of what is present and what is past, what is ancient and what is modern"