Gothic Conventions

Gothic Conventions

1. The vampire

   • The female vampire
     • 'Now that she is a women she must have men'
     • 'this beautiful and ghastly lady'
     • 'The lovely bloodstained lips'
     • 'A deliberate voluptuousness which was both thrilling and repulsive'
     • Carmilla
       • Sheridan LeFanu
       • 1872
       • influenced dracula
       • Female vampire
       • Explored taboos
         • lesbianism
           • Queen Victoria refused to believe it existed
     • 'All claws and teeth'
   • 'Count Dracula is the personification of the undead'-John McRae
   • 'Combines fears and fantasies of consumption'
   • The Vampyre
     • 1819
     • John Polidori
     • First english vampire story
   • 'Whether man or beast i could not tell'
   • 'My bountiful wine-press for a while'
   • 'In the face of the voluptuous and violent sexuality loosed by the decadently licentious vampire, a vigorous sense of patriarchal, bourgeois and family values is restored'-Fred Botting

2. The conscious/sub-conscious

   • 'The beautiful Somnambulist'
   • 'He lies half dreaming, half waking'
   • 'It is wonderful what tricks our dreams play on us, and how conveniently we can imagine'
   • 'We thought her dying whist she slept and sleeping when she died'
   • 'I thought at the time I must be dreaming'
   • The monk
     • Matthew Lewis
     • 1796
     • Monster in his dream
   • 'The sleep of reason produces monsters'
     • Goya
     • Painting
     • 1799
   • 'The Nightmare'
     • Henry Fuseli
     • 1781
   • La Belle Dame Sans Merci
     • John Keats
     • 1820
     • Sleep/Death
   • Ambiguity between Sleep and death
   • Reality/Dreams
   • Characters try to rationalise the supernatural with dreams/imagination
   • 'Dreams are controlled reality'-John McRae
   • 'The gothic is about imagination'-John McRae
   • 'Like a sort of awful nightmare'

3. Transgression

   • Consequences of transgression
     • 'I must bear this mark of shame on my head until judgement day'
     • 'As he had placed the wafer on minas forehead, it had seared it'
   • Knowledge
     • 'I opened the doors of that bookcase'
     • 'My dark newborn curiosity'
     • 'I want to keep up with Jonathan's studies'
   • 'I took the forbidden key from the heap'
   • 'One false step and into the abyss of the dark you stumble'
   • Breaking of boundaries or breaking of rules in society
     • 'All the laws that governed sexual identity and behaviour seemed to be breaking down'-Elaine Showalter
   • 'The key to my enfer'
   • 'It has at its core transgression'- John McRae

4. female roles

   • Female sexual desire
     • 'The lovely bloodstained lips'
     • Male desire
       • 'She was the child of his desire'
       • 'A wicked burning desire that they would kiss me with those lips'
       • 'The sweetest singers he will keep in cages'
       • 'Thrust his verile member into the dead girl'
     • 'It is dinner time, it is bed time'
     • 'Under a spell'
       • Female sexual desire presented as supernatural and therefore other'
     • 'Eyes unclean and full of hell-fire instead of the pure gentle orbs we knew'
     • 'A strange change which i had noticed in the night'
     • 'I fall down for him'
       • Fallen woman
   • 'She laughed him full in the face'
   • 'Undermined social stability' (the new woman) David Rodgers
   • The helpless Maiden
     • 'A brave mans blood is the best thing on this earth when a woman is in trouble'
   • 'They were made by miss lucy'
     • Lucy no longer restricted to gender roles as she is undead. By biting the children she rejects the female maternal role presenting her as both other and monstrous

5. Setting

   • 'The castle'
     • 'She herself is a haunted house'
     • 'He lives in a gloomy mansion'
     • 'The castle stood as before, reared high above the waste of desolation'
     • 'A house of death' (Hillingham)
     • 'There was something wild and uncanny about the place'
     • 'The castle of Dracula now stood out against the red sky'
     • The Castle Of Otranto
       • 1764
       • Horace Walpole
       • 'Labyrinth of darkness'
       • Considered to be one of the first gothic novels
     • often isolated
     • The Woman In Black
       • Susan Hill
       • 1983
     • Rebecca
       • 1938
       • Daphne du Maurier
     • The fall of the House of Usher
       • Edgar Allan Poe
       • 1840
     • Castles/houses often reflect the characteristics of the occupant
       • 'The entire haunted castle is hyper-organic in all its aspects, and therefore serves almost as a character in the text'-Wendy Fall
     • 'The castle is a veritable prison, and I am a prisoner!'
   • The forrest
     • 'The forest closed upon her like a pair of jaws'
     • 'The woods enclose and then enclose again, like a system of Chinese boxes'
     • ''She knew the forest too well to fear it but she must always be on her guard'
     • 'You are always in danger in the forrest'
     • 'A sea of green tree tops'
     • 'We don't control anything nature controls everything'-John McRae
     • The unknown

6. The excessive

   • 'Gothic is the writing of excess'-Fred Botting
   • 'Too many roses. Too many'
   • 'Obscene in their excess'
   • 'She is so beautiful she is unatural'
   • 'Why can't the let a girl marry three men or as many as want her'

7. The monstrous

   • 'Nothing about him reminded me of humanity'
   • 'The worst wolves are hairy on the inside'
   • 'He believes himself to be both less and more than a man'
   • 'Whether man or beast i could not tell'
   • 'Licked her lips like an animal'
   • 'The thing in the coffin writhed'
   • 'Wolves are deep in the psychology of Europe'-John McRae
   • The Monk
     • 1796
     • Matthew Lewis
   • Frankenstein
     • Mary Shelley
     • 1818

8. Death

   • Death/beauty
     • 'Death had given back part of her beauty'
     • Victorian depiction of death as beautiful
       • paintings and photographs of the dead
     • 'A girl who is both death and the maiden'
   • 'The wounds on the throat had absolutely disappeared'
     • Death gives lucy power as she is no longer restricted to gender roles and there is no longer male influence over her as the wounds represent draculas power over her

9. General ideas

   • 'stock characters and devices which are simply recycled from one text to the next'
   • 'The gothic faces our primal fears'-John Mcrae

10. The supernatural

    • 'Nothing human lives here'
    • 'She is so beautiful she is unatural'
    • 'I saw a faint flickering blue flame'
    • The monk
      • accepted supernatural
        • presented as part of the supernatural
    • 'the literary supernatural becomes an element in a greater conversation about human imagination, and the secrets of the human mind, and the nature of human existence as a spiritual creature, not merely a biological organism'- Wendy Fall