# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
The Picture of Dorian Gray Chapter Questions

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Resource - A framework for analysing prose

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.authors[].name
Oxford Academic (Oxford University Press)

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.authors[].name
Oxford Academic (Oxford University Press)

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
The Gothic: A Very Short Introduction | Nick Groom

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.authors[].name
Oxford Academic (Oxford University Press)

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
The Mystery of Ann Radcliffe | Nick Groom

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.authors[].name
Oxford Academic (Oxford University Press)

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Spine-chillers and suspense: A timeline of Gothic fiction

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
From the publication of The Castle of Otranto to House of Leaves, a timeline of important events in the history of Gothic literature.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Skip to Main Content

It looks like you're using Internet Explorer 11 or older. This website works best with modern browsers such as the latest versions of Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and Edge. If you continue with this browser, you may see unexpected results.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
LibGuides: The Rise of Gothic Fiction in England & the United States: A Gothic Timeline

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
LibGuides: The Rise of Gothic Fiction in England & the United States: A Gothic Timeline

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
The Romantics - Liberty (BBC Documentary)

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
"Oscar": 1997 Omnibus documentary of Oscar Wilde, with Michael Bracewell.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
How to tell you’re reading a gothic novel – in pictures

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Are some novels more gothic than others? We return to the genre’s roots in the 18th century for this definitive guide to gothic fiction

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
s a scholar of Gothic fiction I research tales about vampires, ghosts and doppelgangers, and incestuous maniacs pursuing maidens down underground passages. What possible "truth" could such fictions offer? And even if they have truths to tell, what possible relevance could such discoveries have for a Christian audience? Many of my fellow critics would doubt that they have any but a negative truth to tell to religion. The taste for Gothic fiction begins in the Enlightenment period, when the truth claims of religion were being questioned. Maidens fleeing from the rapacious hands of murderous monks in the novels of Ann Radcliffe or Matthew Lewis represent for many the attempt to escape from the constrictions of Christian belief and its oppressive institutions into secular freedom. Encounters with ghostly figures are taken as Kantian attempts to test the limits of reason itself.

But in the 19th century, attention moves to the horrors that lurk in our own psyche. The unconscious comes to be a subject of attention and exploration in stories such as the celebrated Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson.

Although the haunting by a second self may appear to confirm the existence of the supernatural, ever since Freud this apparition has been understood not as a true spiritual presence but as a figure of repression. The eeriness of two selves where there should only be one is, Freud argued, an irruption of disquiet caused by our separation from our origin in our mother's womb. Uncanny is unheimlich in German, or "unhomely", and Freud claims it is the home that we refuse to acknowledge and from which we are estranged which causes the double among other eerie manifestations. Freud's theory is used to account for the plethora of double figures from Frankenstein and his Creature, Poe's William Wilson, Dorian Gray and his portrait, and the tortured protagonists of the Tales of Hoffman, all of whom play out the horror of duality, of a subjectivity rendered uncanny.

In discussing these tales as critiques, Gothic scholars tend to stress their revelation of "cultural anxieties", and the way in which they undermine the moral and religious status quo. Dr Jekyll, for example, is a highly respected physician, who lives in a large and handsome house, and moves in elevated professional circles, in which his own reputation stands high. There is, however, a shady back door to his house, out of which the apish, squat figure of Hyde emerges, to act out violent assaults with monstrous malice. He contradicts the moral behaviour of Dr Jekyll and questions the integrity of his social persona, just as the Gothic scholar aims to lift the veil on Victorian hypocrisy.

What allows this kind of critique is the development of a particular form of subjectivity, which the philosopher Charles Taylor in A Secular Age calls the "buffered self". In his extensive study of how the secular emerged in the modern world, Taylor locates the heart of the change in a seismic shift from the "porous" to the "buffered" self. In pre-modern societies, people inhabit a divinely created cosmos, full of spirits, good and bad, fairies, angels and natural forces, which are seen also to have agency as "acts of God". Even inanimate objects, such as holy relics, can have power over us. Similarly, all levels of social organisation, from realm to parish and guild, are liturgically ordered and are grounded in a higher reality. The self in all this is open to the world, vulnerable and easily affected and possessed by outside forces, natural or supernatural, although the distinction itself is not easily made, since only gradually does an actual "natural" evolve.

Following Max Weber, Taylor uses the term, "disenchantment" to describe the dismantling of this social imaginary, by science and the Enlightenment, industrialisation and so on. In the process the self becomes "buffered", no longer vulnerable to the power of forces beyond the self. He no longer fears demons and thunderstorms and, more radically, they no longer exist for him. He possesses his own selfhood: even God is displaced as he becomes his own centre, with boundaries, social and metaphysical. Self-consciously, we are aware of the magical past, and we count ourselves lucky to have won through. We call the past "backward" and assume we have progressed.

In this account, the modern self is a secular one, deriving causation from scientific accounts, which are intelligible to the mind, which therefore, in a sense, remains emperor of its own experience.

This modern, buffered self is precisely the subjectivity the Gothic tale of the doppelganger seeks to question, showing that the buffers do not work. Taylor even argues that the buffered self deals with the power of desires and passions by denying them the religious meaning they once enjoyed, so that they are reduced to the status of bodily functions to be dealt with rather than being daimonic. It is his desires for forbidden pleasures that lead Jekyll to create Mr Hyde and thus deal surgically with an inconvenience.

This is not a religious conception of identity. For Augustine of Hippo in his fifth-century Confessions, desires need to be ordered but potentially desire itself leads to God, as in the famous line: "Our hearts are restless until they rest in Thee." Only a divine object can satisfy the power of desire.

The language of singularity, of "wholeness", only appears in the most recent liturgy, as an index of Christian decadence. Traditionally, the Christian self was a conflicted and dynamic subjectivity, and expressed in relation to a communal, wholly "porous" reality. St Paul is the architect of the flesh/spirit distinction, which is not, as is often assumed, a body/spirit dualism. The "flesh" Paul speaks of is not the body but the pull of all that enmeshes us in our selfish ego: anger and envy and ambition as well as sexual desires. "My sin," says Dorothy Sayers's Eve in one of her festival plays, "was intellectual".

Sin is being subject to forces within and without: it is a bad form of relationality and the answer is the society of the virtues, in which Christ clothes the self. The medieval play Everyman presents a kind of psychomachia, that is a play about the internal struggle of the soul. But it does so in terms of societies and characters who influence and accompany the soul for good or ill: beauty, good deeds and fellowship. In medieval Christianity the seven deadly sins and their opposing virtues were characters to put on and be lived. To be a Christian was to "put on" Christ, to dress up in his garments and share in his persona.

Nor, in the tradition, are Christians merely dual: saint and sinner. Their soul, Augustine believed, was a vestige of the Trinity, in its triple powers of memory, understanding and will. These derive from their Creator, and the long journey of the Confessions is the tale of the prodigal son, in which memory, ordered through the understanding, leads the will of Augustine to conversion in a story which is that of every believer. Augustine's understanding of the soul as vestige of the Trinity was hugely influential throughout the Middle Ages. Potentially, therefore, Christianity has an understanding of the self as dual or triple, or multiple, a relational subjectivity, which finds its selfhood in union with Christ and his body the church. Human beings are works in progress, and sites of a divine drama, wholly relational and porous.

While we live we shall always be self-divided. As St Paul wrote: "For the good that I would I do not: but the evil that I would not, that I do." And in showing us the darkness of the double self the Gothic, for all its horror and terror, tells us the truth: we are all Cain and Abel: "the whole seed of Adam, not divided/ But fearfully joined in the darkness of the double self". But this duality is our hope and not our despair.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Gothic fiction tells us the truth about our divided nature | Alison Milbank

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
s a scholar of Gothic fiction I research tales about vampires, ghosts and doppelgangers, and incestuous maniacs pursuing maidens down underground passages. What possible "truth" could such fictions offer? And even if they have truths to tell, what possible relevance could such discoveries have for a Christian audience?

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
There is a surge in goth-lit that channels our fears and anxieties. Hephzibah Anderson explores how the genre's past and new stories delve deep into disorder and darkness.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Opium, laudanum and other narcotic drugs played an important part in Victorian life.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
The PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY CHAPTERS 17&18

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
During the reign of Queen Victoria, a woman's place was considered to be in the home. Then the mood changed, as charitable missions began to extend the female role of service, and Victorian feminism began to emerge as a potent political force.

The icon

During the reign of Queen Victoria, a woman's place was in the home, as domesticity and motherhood were considered by society at large to be a sufficient emotional fulfilment for females. These constructs kept women far away from the public sphere in most ways, but during the 19th century charitable missions did begin to extend the female role of service, and Victorian feminism emerged as a potent political force.

The transformation of Britain into an industrial nation had profound consequences for the ways in which women were to be idealised in Victorian times. New kinds of work and new kinds of urban living prompted a change in the ways in which appropriate male and female roles were perceived. In particular, the notion of separate spheres - woman in the private sphere of the home and hearth, man in the public sphere of business, politics and sociability - came to influence the choices and experiences of all women, at home, at work, in the streets.

' ... Victoria became an icon of late-19th-century middle-class femininity and domesticity. '

The Victorian era, 1837-1901, is characterised as the domestic age par excellence, epitomised by Queen Victoria, who came to represent a kind of femininity which was centred on the family, motherhood and respectability. Accompanied by her beloved husband Albert, and surrounded by her many children in the sumptuous but homely surroundings of Balmoral Castle, Victoria became an icon of late-19th-century middle-class femininity and domesticity.

Indeed, Victoria came to be seen as the very model of marital stability and domestic virtue. Her marriage to Albert represented the ideal of marital harmony. She was described as 'the mother of the nation', and she came to embody the idea of home as a cosy, domestic space. When Albert died in 1861 she retreated to her home and family in preference to public political engagements.

Published: 2001-08-09

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Ideals of Womanhood in Victorian Britain

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Discover how attitudes to a woman's place changed, as charitable missions began to extend the female role of service, and Victorian feminism began to emerge as a potent political force.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
BBC - History - British History in depth: Women’s Rights Quiz

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
What it was like to be a woman in Victorian Britain? When could women keep their earnings for themselves - test your knowledge to find out.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
9. Exemplar 4 The Gothic, Bloody Chamber and Dracula

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
The Picture of Dorian Gray chapters 19&20

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
An unusual and provocative look at the life and legacy of Oscar Wilde. (1997)

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Andrew Graham-Dixon looks at 19th-century Britain's obsession with all things Gothic.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Greg Jenner is joined by Dr Corin Throsby and comedian Ed Gamble to look at the role of vampires in Gothic Literature of the 19th century and the effect on modern day pop culture.

Host Greg Jenner is joined by Dr Corin Throsby and Comedian Ed Gamble to look at the role and development of vampire characters throughout 19th century Gothic literature and its continuing effect on pop culture today. Which vampire character is based on infamous bad boy Lord Byron? Who was the first vampire character to have fangs? And in case you ever need to know, just how many ways are there to kill a vampire?

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
BBC Radio 4 - You're Dead To Me, Vampires in Gothic Literature

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Greg Jenner is joined by Dr Corin Throsby and comedian Ed Gamble to look at the role of vampires in Gothic Literature of the 19th century and the effect on modern day pop culture.