Gothic Critics (Beloved and TBC)

Gothic Critics (Beloved and TBC)

1. Generic Gothic critical views

   • "The past is inescapable, and indissolubly linked to the present" (Nick Groom)
   • "The Gothic blurs the boundaries of the victim and perpetrator" (Nick Groom)
   • The central question within the Gothic is "who, or what, am I?" (Nick Groom)
   • Gothic texts are "written by outsiders"(John McCrae)
   • The Gothic was "appealing to everyone who enjoyed a vicarious thrill" not just to women (John McCrae)
   • Gothic and supernatural
     • "Ghosts, like gothics, disrupt our sense of what is present and what is past, what is ancient and what is modern" (John Bowen)
     • "everything that characters and readers think that they’ve safely left behind comes back with a vengeance" (John Bowen)
     • "Exciting rather than informing, it chilled their blood, delighted their superstitious fancies" (Fred Botting)
   • "Gothic landscapes are desolate, alienating and full of menace" (Fred Botting)
   • “Gothic novels "adopt a cautionary strategy, warning of dangers of social and moral transgression in their darkest and most threatening form" (Fred Botting)
   • "The genre of Gothic is a particularly strange and perverse family of texts" (John Bowen)
   • "Gothic signifies a writing of excess" (Fred Botting)
   • "Gothic fictions seemed to promote vice and violence, giving free reign to selfish ambitions and sexual desires" (Fred Botting)
   • "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" (Fred Botting)

2. 'Beloved' critics

   • "The quest for identity and sense of self is at the heart of Beloved' (Platt)
   • "The logic of the revenant is that it cannot be laid to rest and will return...the multiple and complex violences and hatreds engendered by slavery cannot be laid to rest" (David Punter)
   • "Gothic always remains the symbolic site of culture's discursive struggle to define and claim possession of the civilised, and to abject, to throw off, what is seen as being other to that civilised self" (David Punter)
   • "Female Gothic typically represents a female protagonist's attempts to escape from a confining interior" (David Punter)
   • "Only that which is treated as human...can be properly buried; if you try to bury that which has been denied its human rights to begin with, then there is no possibility that the stone will remain in place" (David Punter)
   • "The past is constantly contaminating the present...it's only when the past is confronted that these characters can begin to release from its shackles and move forward" (Bernadine Evaristo)
   • "The past rises up and cries for blood, like Beloved" (Byatt)
   • "Beloved has to be understood as a physical manifestation of slavery which haunts her people who have tried to repress the pain of its memory, but which has to be faced and exorcised" (Birch)
   • "Only by remembering the past can there be liberation from its burden" (Furman)
   • "The past is more real than the present" (Hathaway)
   • "The past, until you confront it...keeps coming back in other forms" (Morrison)
   • "My job becomes how to rip that veil drawn over 'proceedings too terrible to relate'" (Morrison)
   • "What I wanted to do was put the locus, the heart of the story, within the minds of the slaves themselves and have white people sort of drift away and be the background as far as characters are concerned so what you have is the system itself" (Morrison)

3. 'The Bloody Chamber' critics

   • ‘Hers is not an easy feminism’ (Elaine Jordan)
   • ‘her Marquis belongs to a latter-day generation of Bluebeard’s progeny’ (Rebecca Laroche)
   • ‘Passivity is never a virtue, in fact, even - especially not- in women’ (Helen Simpson)
   • ‘A true Gothic heroine, like Carter’s, goes where she should not’ (Rebecca Laroche)
   • ‘This long story (title story) subtly links the fairy tale, Gothic literature, and pornographic literature’ (Rebecca Laroche)
   • ‘Some of their most beautiful passages are about metamorphosis’ (Helen Simpson)
   • ‘The imminence of death pervades her work' (Rosemary Hill)
   • ‘Her main concern is to subvert the conventional ideologies and replace them with feminist ones’ (Su Na Choi)
   • 'Otherness takes centre stage’ (Fred Botting)
   • ‘It is the women who become active and saviours, not the men’ (Merja Makinen)
   • ‘The heroines of these stories are struggling out of the straightjacket of history and ideology’ (Helen Simpson)
   • ‘The animal aspects of human nature are her particular concern’ (Duncker)
   • ‘Carter's work has consistently dealt with representations of the physical abuse of women.’ (Merja Makinen)