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Supernatural Horror in Literature|H P Lovecraft|Free download|PDF EPUB|Freeditorial

Essay | English | 02/10/14

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THE OLDEST and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown. These facts few psychologists will dispute, and their admitted truth must establish for all time the genuineness and dignity of the weirdly horrible tale as a literary form. Against it are discharged all the shafts of a materialistic sophistication which clings to frequently felt emotions and external events, and of a naïvely insipid idealism which deprecates the æsthetic motive and calls for a didactic literature to "uplift" the reader toward a suitable degree of smirking optimism.

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Dracula: Reflection and Rebuke of Victorian Society 

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Dracula: Reflection and Rebuke of Victorian Society 

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Bram Stoker's now legendary novel, Dracula, is not just any piece of cult-spawning fiction, but rather a time capsule containing the popular thoughts, ideas, and beliefs of the Victorian era that paints an elaborate picture of what society was like for Bram Stoker's generation.

The dated ideas reflected in Dracula focus primarily on the concepts of lust, sex, and evil as they were viewed during the late 19th and 20th century in what can be viewed as a strongly conservative society. At the time, sex and homosexuality were controversial topics, with emphasis constantly put upon the importance of using caution and awareness when involving such matters and encouraging an overall chaste and modest lifestyle. Such beliefs are boldly represented throughout the book, and often center on the glorifying resistance of temptation while advising against the inevitable temptation to "taste the forbidden fruit".

However, it is important to explore the views and atmosphere of the time period of Dracula's writing to better understand how the legendary "evil" that is Dracula came to be. A result of common Victorian-era fears and Stoker's own personal views on sex and homosexuality, Dracula is a marvel stemming from many sources.

Dracula was written and published before the suffragette movement had "taken off" (Levin 14) during the early-mid 20th century, leaving the expectations and standards for women extremely limiting. Though society maintained strict social standards and expectations for both sexes, men were permitted many more freedoms and pleasures than their female counterparts. The patriarchal tendencies and views of the Victorian society further enforced male superiority and dominance over women (therefore automatically granting them the most freedoms), which in turn also provided countless excuses to justify male sexuality and carnal urges; especially those which women were expected to suppress and constantly refrain from expressing. It was unheard of for a female to be sexually assertive in any way, and such an idea would likely have been a very disturbing and frightening concept to a conservative society, seeing as it was deemed unnatural for and decent lady to behave in such a manner. The theory justifying the abnormality of a female sex drive is that "male sexual pleasure (is) necessary for reproduction and female pleasure (is) not, (therefore) sexual pleasure (is) the sole providence of men," (Weiman and Dionisapoulas 34; Lyndon 202; Bohn 25). The mentality ultimately supported the conclusion that the female sex drive has no purpose and, therefore, should not exist. If it was, in fact apparent, one can assume the women would be chastised for being "unnatural", and most "unnatural" occurrences of the Victorian era could only be explained by the workings of "evil" forces (chiefly Satanic powers). The three mistress vampires encountered in Dracula's castle "represent all the qualities of how a woman should not be; voluptuous and sexually aggressive" (Pektas 1).

A main advocate of Stoker's novel summarizes and epitome of the mixed feelings and emotions which would potentially have surfaced in a situation where the man is confronted by the woman:

"The fair girl went on her knees and bent over me, fairly gloating. There was a deliberate voluptuousness which was both thrilling and repulsive, and as she arched her neck, she actually licked her lips like an animal, till I could see in the moonlight the moisture shining on the scarlet lips and on the red tongue as it lapped the white, sharp, teeth" (Stoker 50).

This particular passage describes the mixed feelings men had towards forward women; temptation made the "unnatural" occurrence of female sexual advances desirable (as it was the "forbidden fruit"), yet from a God-believing gentleman's standpoint, it was purely evil and almost animalistic. Alluding to the fact that, again, a man's sexual attraction was not entirely his own fault or "responsibility" (per say), this passage also insinuates that women can only be seductively appealing when deliberately tempting a man to "take the forbidden fruit" himself; another reference to evil's association with a woman's sexuality. Even if a woman tempted a man and he took the bate, it would still be considered the woman's fault for defying the set social expectations for proper ladies, as the men could not easily control what was natural to them.

Expectations and standards concerning ladylike behavior were very confining and limited the expression of many natural emotions and freedoms:

"A woman could not show her legs or even say 'leg'. Even pianos had 'limbs', and those (wore) fluffy coverings so as not to be seen. (Neither) 'leg' nor 'breast' could be (spoken) in polite company" (Levin 103).

Rules such as the above stated show just how ridiculous and rigid Victorian's standards for ladies could become. The importance of these "rules" can most likely be accredited to the fact that to their male counterparts, women were a reputation of purity, vulnerability, weakness, and naïve innocence. If a woman were ever to reverse the roles and become "sexually aggressive"(Pektas 1) and assertive about her desires, her image of chaste fragility and submissive dependence upon men would be shattered, diluting the superior, dominant image of men, as well. One can assume that women who were, in fact, more sexually open and assertive were labeled as having "tainted" their innocence with the deadly sin of "lust", and were surely on an unholy path to damnation. When Lucy Westerna becomes "tainted" with the evils of Dracula (thus becoming a "lusty" representation of the female figure), her overall mannerisms are described as having a "cold-bloodedness"(Stoker 240) to them, greatly contrasting with the previous descriptions of her loving and virtuous demeanor when she was chaste and conservative.

The concept of "evil" incorporated with aggressive sexual behaviours and sexual temptations very much plays into the evil and appalling behaviors of Dracula. The beliefs of Stoker's generation magnified the already obscene tendencies of the character himself, adversely creating a shock-factor amongst the Victorian audience, making an epic contribution to the controversial views of sex and sexuality within the society.

Women's rights in a heterosexual relationship were not nearly as prominent an issue as the ongoing conflicts over the concept of homosexuality, which Stoker was witness to on a first hand account. It was a very serious matter, especially in an age when anything out of the ordinary was considered to be "unnatural" and, again, to be "unnatural" meant to be against God's will (what was "normal"), therefore making it evil and wrong. Homosexuality was, in fact, so serious a matter within society that it was even considered to be a crime, punishable by imprisonment if tried and found guilty of participating in homoerotic behaviors. Some whom were "(found) guilty" of "committing acts of gross indecency" (ibid 83; Pektas 7) could be "convicted to the maximum of two years in jail with hard labour (ibid 83; Pekats 7).

Further adding to the shock-factor and controversy of the novel, an underlying homoerotic theme is carefully laid down by Stoker via many homosexual references, insinuations, and symbolism throughout the book. Almost as though playing directly off of society's fears of the "unnatural", the count seems to be an exaggerated representation of the concept concerning the "evils" of abnormality and how it can stem from one source and infect the surrounding society with discord and misfortune. Mirroring the social fears and distaste towards homosexuality, the count embodies the concept of the "abnormal" mingling among a "normal" society, chiefly by posing as a "sexual threat who threatens to destroy the moral order and turn (his surroundings) into a depraved society through his violation of people" (Pektas 2). Most prominent among his offences, the count violates men "by penetrating and sucking the blood" which is viewed as "a coding of homosexual acts" (Pektas 2). This reinforces the play upon the apprehensive feelings towards the acceptance of what is "different", as it is an example of how one evil thrown into a "pure" society can cause a large-scale onslaught of chaos and corruption.

A major underlying sexual connotation Stoker uses as an implication of homosexuality is the excessive use of blood throughout the novel itself. Blood and sexuality within Dracula were very closely related, "reflecting the Victorians belief that blood is sperm" therefore, when feeding upon blood and exchanging bodily fluids "(it) can be associated with intercourse" (Pektas 2). The Victorians most likely concluded that blood did indeed have such an intimate relation to spermatic fluids as a result of shared biological characteristics between the two substances themselves. Sexually transmitted diseases, such as syphilis, had been just recently discovered, and were still relatively enigmatic to a dreading society. Discerning that blood could pass disease/ (identified as "bad blood" at the time) from one being to the next and then discovering that spermatic fluids held the same ability (regarding STDs), a connection between the two was inevitably made, such as "(linking) sexuality to syphilis, and (also) to blood" (Anttonen 9). It was "a time when sexually transmitted diseases (had become) a part of everyday life (Anttonen 9) as a result of being one of the newest and most disturbing scientific discoveries made at that point in time. Thus it became a popular conversational and debatable topic among the intellectual, reinforcing the value of the belief via repetition and the occasional misinterpretation (which distorted its severity and caused it to become more intensely feared).

The emphasis upon the evils of carnal sexuality and lust-driven behaviors in Dracula was derived from various influential sources in the author's life itself. Fashioning the character Dracula after a real-life historical figure, Bram Stoker's novel increased the fame of Romanian tyrant, Vladislav Dracula. Stoker's fascination with the brutality of Dracula began when he "discovered (Vlad Dracula) while researching his novel at the North Yorkshire Library" (Bohn 14) and decidedly was inspired enough to title the main character, and even the very book itself, after the prince. One can assume that Stoker, showing great interest and curiosity in all things sexual, was fascinated not by Dracula's economic of political achievements during his rule, but by the appalling methods of torture he used to turn sexuality into a concept fixedly associated with pain and evil within the minds of his subjects. "Vlad Dracula (presented) a sadistic sexuality in delivering punishment for moral crimes such as infidelity" (Bohn 14), and often the punishment involved the mangling of the sexual organs or impalement. Using enigmatic approaches to sustain power and control over the minds of his people, Vlad Dracula (also known as "Vlad the Impaler") would punish such minor sins as an unfaithful wife by "(cutting out) her sexual organs" and "(skinning) her alive" (Bohn 14). A punishment to maidens who did not remain virgins until marriage was to have the "nipples cut from (the) woman's breasts or a red hot iron shoved through the vagina until the instrument emerged from the mouth" (Bohn 14), the latter containing several sexual connotations involving the penetration and cleansing of sexual evil via the mouth (oral sex) or vagina (vaginal sex). In general, Vlad the Impaler emphasized the importance of remaining pure and chaste, though taking a much more extremist approach than the Victorians did. Again, these heinous acts of "retribution" further enforced the evils of unruly lust by demonstrating how such qualities bring pain and misfortune upon those who engage in such sins. It is incredibly ironic that Stoker would use such an extremist as an inspiration for his sadistic character, though it furthers the effect which he intended to create by adding an even more sinister twist to the contrast between what was "good and pure" (by Victorian standards), and what was considered to be "vile and unholy." Continued on Next Page "

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Bram Stoker's Dracula: A Reflection and Rebuke of Victorian Society

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Bram Stoker's now legendary novel, Dracula, is not just any piece of cult-spawning fiction, but rather a time capsule containing the popular thoughts, ideas, and beliefs of the Victorian era that paints an elaborate picture of what society was like for Bram Stoker's generation.

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In the past two-hundred or so years, vampires have transformed from a sort of worst nightmare into the charming hero of our dreams. Flashback to 1734, Oxford English Dictionary's first record of the word vampire: they were generally and, depending on geographical location, inconsistently thought to be red-faced, fat on blood, furry of foot, and may or may not have possessed more than one nostril. Fast-forward to present: their impossibly pale, perfectly sculpted faces and delicate fangs adorn best-selling book covers and box-office hit movie posters. This is quite the makeover, and these vampires have myriad horror and romance authors, as well as scriptwriters and directors, to thank for their drastic change in fortunes.

The modern day vampire originated in literature, long before movies, television shows, and online fan groups. The vampires readers now know and may or may not love were created in 1819 with John Polidori's The Vampire. This tale of an orphaned but affluent gentleman visiting London, who meets and befriends Lord Ruthven (the vampire) set the scene for future vampire fiction, converting the heretofore mindless creature into a being of intelligence and sophistication. "Polidori transformed the vampire from a character in folklore into the form that is recognized today - an aristocratic fiend who preys among high society" (Frayling). Lord Byron is often inaccurately credited as the author of this work, as Polidori was his personal physician and accompanied Byron on his trip to Lake Geneva with Percy and Mary Shelley. The "Vampyre" was created on this trip, as a result of the same rainy day writing prompt as Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, and illustrated English society's increasing fascination with the macabre. This new rendition of vampirism continued in serial publications such as Varney the Vampire written by James Malcolm Rymer in 1847. This work appeared in weekly installments, and was referred to as a "penny dreadful" because of its low price and poor quality of writing. It was quite long, somewhere around 800 pages, and detailed the adventures of Varney, a Victorian gentleman who wreaked havoc on women, families, societies, and often himself. Another important work is Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu's Carmilla, written in 1871, which features a vampirical Austrian countess who preys on young women. However, the majority of these works are little known in comparison to Bram Stoker's 1897 Dracula, which is commonly regarded as the original vampire novel. Stoker drew from many previous vampire novels to create his own Count Dracula, the ghastly gentleman who lives in a Transylvanian castle and is eventually destroyed by vampire slayer van Helsing. Marilyn Ross (technically W.E. Daniel Ross writing under a female pseudonym) later wrote the Barnabas Collins series in 1966-71, based on the Dark Shadows TV series, which set the trend of vampires as tragic heroes rather than as the epitome of evil.

More recently, author Anne Rice has been generally regarded as the reigning queen of vampire literature. Her highly popular and influential Vampire Chronicles (1976-2003) detail the escapades of Lestat and Louis, two vampires living in New Orleans, and progress to illustrate dozen or so other vampire characters spanning the globe and the centuries- many of whom possess their own book: The Vampire Lestat, The Vampire Armand, Vittorio the Vampire, and Pandora are a few examples.

Says Margaret Carter, author of The Vampire as Alien in Contemporary Fiction, "The focus on vampire subjectivity opens what was once a repulsive object of horrified speculation into a creature of extreme sensitivity and pathos. The narrative position 'reflects a change in cultural attitudes towards the outsider', an effect of Romanticism that, in various contemporary fictions, turns the threat of the vampire into an attractive quality." The story thus blurs the line between a world of human subjects and terrifying, unnatural creatures. As with Mary Shelley's Romantic monster of nature, the conferring of a voice within the text endows the vampire with feelings, motives and, of course, a strange humanity (Botting).

Less teen-oriented, but similarly popular is Laurell K. Hamilton's Anita Blake: Vampire Hunter series, which focuses on a young policewoman in St. Louis who also happens to be a necromancer and human servant of the master vampire of the city.

Deviating from traditional vampire lore, J.R. Ward's Black Dagger Brotherhood series holds vampires to be of an entirely different species than humans, and to require the blood of the opposite sex in order to survive. These vampires live fairly normal childhoods, until they undergo a transition in their twenties which leaves them unable to bear sunlight. The series follows the adventures of six vampire brothers who defend their race against humans who have lost their souls.

Kim Harrison's The Hollows series takes an alternate history approach, where a virus inside a genetically modified tomato wiped out a quarter of the human race. As a result of this pandemic, various paranormal and occult beings, such as vampires, werewolves, fairies, witches, etc. reveal themselves to the much-diminished human population and begin their own open communities.

Mary Janice Davidson has created a highly popular comical series about a woman who- all on her thirtieth birthday- loses her job, gets killed in a car crash, and then wakes up in the funeral home to discover that she is somehow queen of the vampires.

In the past three years, however, a new author by the name of Stephenie Meyer has held captive an enormous teen (and even adult) audience with her wildly popular Twilight series. Perhaps one of the most realistic and relatable of modern vampire stories, it follows the life of Bella Swan after she moves to a small and rainy Oregon town and encounters - in her high school, posing as a student- hundred-year-old vampire Edward Cullen.

Jessica Boyer, a 20-year-old English major at Florida State University and an avid Twilight and paranormal romance fan, says, "True love conquers all. It's a story of compromise and growing up, with the added benefit of a supernatural twist. But there's still interesting and fairly realistic character interaction, throughout most of the book. I think it's so popular because it appeals to virtually everyone with a romantic bone in their body. It's this gorgeous everlasting vampire who's been alive for a century and never found someone like her; that I-can't-live-without-you kind of love. Its like Romeo and Juliet without the sad ending and the indecipherable Shakespearean writing."

On USA Today's Best-Selling Books list, the top four were Twilight, New Moon, Eclipse, and Breaking Dawn- incredibly, all vampire romance novels by the same author - Stephenie Meyer. Following this, an additional nineteen books on this list were paranormal romances.

"Not since Anne Rice's best-selling series about Lestat have so many readers thirsted for novels about blood drinkers who are sexy as well as scary. 'It's a different twist on the bad-boy hero,' says Nicole Kennedy of Romance Writers of America. At Borders stores, sales of novels with paranormal themes, which include vampires, are up as much as 30% over the past two years, particularly romance, says spokeswoman Sue Grimshaw. 'Readers have embraced the genre.' Nearly 20% of all romance novels sold in 2005 had paranormal story lines, compared with 14% in 2004, according to Romance Writers of America figures. 'Vampires are one of the most popular trends in paranormal romance,' Kennedy says" (USA TODAY).

Vampires in television and movies have followed doggedly along with literary trends- often, some of the most popular vampire novels have been turned into hit shows and films.

The 1922 silent film Nosferatu was essentially an unauthorized adaptation of Bram Stoker's Dracula, using different character names, and omitting some characters entirely. The plot is more or less the same, with only slight deviations from the original novel. The official movie, Dracula, was released in 1931, followed by The Horror of Dracula in 1958, and Bram Stoker's Dracula in 1992. Also spawned from the original Dracula story are movies such as Dracula's Daughter, Brides of Dracula, and Zoltan, Hound of Dracula.

One of the most well known vampire movies, more prominently also a T.V. show, is Buffy the Vampire Slayer. The movie, produced in 1992, is a parody about a cheerleader destined to kill vampires, and has been deemed of little importance in light of the highly popular T.V. show. The Emmy Award-winning and Golden Globe-nominated show spanned six years, and usually reached between four and six million viewers on original airings. The show takes a darker and more serious approach to the movie, and follows Buffy through high school troubles and battles with evil vampires bent on unleashing Hell upon her hometown of Sunnydale.

Fans of Buffy say that the combination of reality and fantasy is the main attraction. Donald Godfree, a 25-year-old nursing student at Florida Community College Jacksonville, has followed the television series through its many seasons. "It was real life, but with supernatural stuff going on, too. It was like being a teenager and experiencing escapism all at the same time."

Anne Rice's smash novels Interview with a Vampire and Queen of the Damned were also made into movies in 1994 and 2002, respectively. Interview with a Vampire was deemed a box office hit, and made almost $100 million in the United States. Queen of the Damned managed to top the box office, despite a lukewarm reaction from fans, and poor reviews from critics.

Blade I & II (which are actually adaptations of Marvel comics of the same name) are about a man who is half-human, half-vampire, and fights his urge to drink blood by injecting himself with a chemical substance. Ironically, he swears vengeance against his own race and becomes a vampire hunter, eventually dealing with an inter-vampire feud about those of pure blood and those who were merely created.

"The dead used to be a world away, far beyond the realm of mortal existence. If they walked the Earth at all, they inhabited the night. But the coffins and long black capes are gone. The destructive haunting is over. And forget about menacing the living - these days, the dead are just like us. Hollywood's dead, circa 2008, wear jeans, type obsessively on their BlackBerries and fret over relationship woes. They solve crimes, they give advice" (Associated Press).

The movie adaptation of Stephenie Meyer's Twilight book series hits theaters in November, and has already created a huge sensation predominately among young adults. "You know a movie is going to be huge when the soundtrack tops the sales charts before the film is even released," says Rolling Stone's Daniel Kreps. The soundtrack has sold 165,000 copies before the film has even hit theaters. "What Twilight does offer is epic star-crossed romance, melodrama, peril, an attractive young cast and an action-packed finale. But mostly, it has arguably the most passionate fan base of any literary adaptation since Harry Potter. 'It's like a little bizarre, little perfect-storm phenomenon,' said Twilight director Catherine Hardwicke" (Washington Post).

Anthony Masters, author of The Natural History of the Vampire, is less than complimentary on the vampires of modern day. "Most of these modern vampires are psychotic and have abandoned the traditions of their forebears. It is much more likely for your twentieth-century vampire to be a pallid-faced little man with a greasy tie and carpet slippers living in the suburbs than a Gothic monster." Continued on Next Page "

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Vampires: The Ever-Changing Face of Fear

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In the past two-hundred or so years, vampires have transformed from a sort of worst nightmare into the charming hero of our dreams. Flashback to 1734, Oxford English Dictionary's first record of the word vampire: they were generally and, depending...

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Charlotte Brontë invests gothic elements in Jane Eyre with a symbolic meaning to create a new, 'female' language. It is through this female Gothic language that Brontë creates a heroine whose autobiographical mode of writing is used to trace a story of female rebellion and search for identity. Although the use of gothic as the new 'female' language is a subversion of the predominant phallocentric language of the time, the need for a woman writer to make her assertions through the gothic, the symbolic and therefore the indirect implies that this new female gothic also represents the agency the woman and girl in 19 th century Victorian England did not have. The romantic aspect of Gothic is used to reflect and rebel against this reality which is done from the Eurocentric perspective of a 19 th century British woman.

Brontë cleverly constructs a female language by giving her heroine a 'gothic' imagination. On another level, Jane Eyre tells her 'Reader' how she was influenced by this Gothic imagination as a child. The younger Jane wants the book she reads to be ''stored of pictures." Jane's imagination, being unlike the one of "contended, happy little children," and having a nascent, "underdeveloped understanding," construes the images she finds in "Bewick's History of British Birds" in her own unique way. For "the fiend pinning down the thief's back" and the "black horned" things were objects of terror for her. These "half comprehended" but 'strangely impressive notions are also influenced by Gothic novels like "Pamela" and " Henry, Earl of Moorland " and later "maturing youth" adds "to them a vigour and vividness beyond what childhood could give." Ironically, the Gothic imagination she imbibed through the male authored texts translates into the language in which she tells her story. Her gothic does not solely breach the classical, as Robert Heilman ("Charlotte Brontë's 'New' Gothic") notes, but it is a medium through which both Brontë and Jane present their feminist story in a female language otherwise unacceptable to the Victorian readership.

Having established this, the Gothic is used through the imagery of enclosed spaces of the house to explore the constrictions placed on the female body and the fear of "female incarceration within domestic spaces" (Smith). Ironically, by using 'enclosure' to explain female constrictions, Brontë gives space to the female body in literary texts. The red room incident has multiple symbolic meanings, one of which is the entrapment of Victorian women in the confines of the male dominated space of the house. The "square chamber" with its "red carpet," "crimson cloth" against the "white" pillows, "snowy" counterpane suggests the entrapment of the Victorian woman as either the angel in the house, or the mad woman in the attic, as having either extreme restraint or passion. Later Jane expresses "the restlessness" which "agitated me to pain" when she is confined to the 'battlements' of Thornfield. Given Brontë's seclusion in her house, and her life as a governess, she writes of what Gilbert and Gubar ("Infection in the Sentence") call, "the woman writer's sense of powerlessness" and fears about occupying "incomprehensible spaces."

The representation of the entrapped female body leads to the issue of suppression of female sexuality. Bertha Mason is the Gothic symbol through which female sexuality and passion are represented. Bertha is described as "a clothed hyena," the "foul German spectre-the vampyre," displaying "virile force" and being almost equal to her husband in stature. The intention of this Gothic representation is to show that if a woman was not trapped within the limits of socially approved domesticity, she would be shut behind the "small black door in some Bluebeard's Castle." As Elaine Showalter notes ("Charlotte Brontë: Feminine Heroine") the periodicity of Bertha Mason's attacks suggest a connection to the menstrual cycle. This is a critique of society which was bent on controlling female sexuality, the expression of which was labelled as 'madness.' For, the 19 th century physicians "worried" that menstruation "could" cause temporary insanity, making the woman attack people, destroy furniture- just as Bertha Mason 'apparently ' does when she bites her brother Richard Mason, and Jane is called in for help to ensure that this event in recoded in her memory to recount to the 'Reader.'

The parallels between Jane and Bertha are drawn to suggest that if Jane seeks equality, love, an identity, she has to repress her passionate side. If Bertha was "crawling on all fours" like an animal in her "den," Jane was like a "mad cat', a "picture of passion" in the Red Room then suggesting Jane, like Bertha was punished for expressing passion ( 'insanity' in the Victorian sense which would attribute it to Jane's passage through the menstrual cycle). The older Jane consciously portrays the younger Jane as the 'mad' Bertha, and describes Bertha in terms of the 'other' to define her older self. From being the 'mad cat' to the ethereal ''malicious elf'', like a "linnet" she has to project herself as being devoid of sexuality. Rochester compares "Jane's clear eyes to the red balls yonder" wishing to see in Jane what Helen Moglen ("Creation of a Feminist Myth") calls," the angelic woman purged of all sensuality n sexuality,"

The genre of the female Gothic is characterised by restoration of identity through the discovery of a lost mother, in Jane's case Diana and Mary, her sisters. The moon and moonlight are personified as matriarchal guiding forces, asserting the importance of Jane finding such a figure to establish her identity in a patriarchal society. The fissure between the split chestnut tree, is momentarily presided over by the moon, with "her" half overcast blood red disk, throwing a "bewildered, dreary glance" at Jane and vanishing instantly. Jane and Rochester, cannot marry until Jane restores her identity by finding a matriarchal figure. Diana and Mary are her matriarchal guides, whom she finds after searching for such figures throughout in the novel. It is the "white human form" of the moon "inclining a glorious blow earthward" that directs Jane to leave Thornfield, asking her to "Flee Temptation," the temptation of becoming a "stranger" to herself by Rochester's overpowering treatment and also escape being the fallen woman she would be seen as having married while Mrs Rochester lived. It is the matriarchal spirit guiding Jane to find her mother figure, to establish her identity before marrying Rochester.

The symbolic function of moonlight highlights the importance of dreams, and paintings in Jane Eyre. These voice female anxiety about being trapped as the 'angel of the house' through marriage, are prophetic of how Jane's feminist ambition will be achieved within the gothic framework of the novel. The "anxious excitement" and "regretful conscience of some barrier dividing" her and Rochester felt by Jane is expressed through the 'child' in her dreams; the child, which according to Bessie was "a sure sign of trouble." Jane is aware of the trouble their unequal marriage would bring. The "tensions of the engagement period" (Gordon) are voiced through dreams, so is the prophetic escape of Jane from this unequal marriage. When Jane comes to the "dreary ruin" of Thornfield on a moonlit night in her dream, it is an indication that that patriarchal authority will give way to accept Jane as an equal. Similarly, in Jane's third watercolour painting, her "presentment," the "crescent" is like a "kingly crown" over the colossal head of Latmos - Rochester's blinding is foreseen as is the fact that Jane will be his guide, just as she is when he falls off the 'Gytrash'. Rochester's metaphorical castration through blinding, hinted throughout in the text throughout, is then a way in which Jane creates a space for herself, how Brontë asserts the need for such a space where an equal marriage is possible.

If these gothic elements voice female anxieties, they also acknowledge the absence of such a voice for Victorian women. Further, the gothic intervention, resolution of the plot does suggest that though Jane cannot but love Rochester, she has to acquire economic independence and a family to unite with him and he too has to change. The symbolic 'punishment', of Rochester, to show her as Jane's equal then suggests the lack of any other means to make him Jane's equal in an overtly patriarchal world. When Jane cannot marry Rochester for the fear of losing her identity by his overpowering her and showering her with material gifts, Berth rents the bridal veil, symbolising the failure of their marriage, Bertha tries to burn Rochester after he confides in Jane - here Bertha functions as the agency Jane could not have, having supressed the socially unacceptable shades of passion in her, having achieved the balanced behaviour of Miss Temple, if not the excessive restraint of Helen Burns. When the child in Jane's dreams dies, rolling from Jane's knees, symbolic of Bertha's death, therefore symbolic of the death of younger Jane's passion, gothic intervention brings Jane to Rochester. Symbolically, "the candle is burnt out, the room is full of moonlight," that is Jane has found her ideal matriarchal guides and more explicitly, a voice calls out to her, "Jane, Jane, Jane!" The actions for which Jane has the will are enacted through external gothic agents, not her own agency. Jane's ambition of female improvement had been achieved, yet she had to return to Rochester. Social improvement, economic independence, even rejecting St. John River's proposal, "the extraordinary contempt of a young virginal woman for the Victorian concept of sex as duty" (Mago) were not sufficient realisations for her.

The fact that Jane writes a gothic novel to represent female desire implies that she is not satisfied, that the society is not ready for such feminist representation. Her feminist intention cannot be doubted for she clearly insists that "women feel just as men feel" and that they need faculty for expression of their suppressed feeling. Though Rochester is "no better than the old lightning-struck chestnut tree in Thornfield orchard" with his "crippled strength" and "seared vision," he will still give a "bountiful shadow," dependence to Jane. Marriage also makes it "impractical" for Jane to teach Adele. This is not a loophole in Jane's "bright visions...of life, fire, feeling," her feminist ambition. This is a very realist portrayal of the boundaries, limitations of the Victorian woman in marriage. The limitation of Jane's feminist agenda is that it is envisioned for the 'white', British woman. Brontë depicts "a woman writer's quest for her own story" as Gilbert and Gubar ("Infection in the Sentence") write, by giving her the agency of expression through the female gothic, by using it as the language of her female ambition. This she does not and never meant to do so for Bertha Mason, the 'Creole,' the 'other' who is used to define what Jane is not. Having served the purpose of depicting Jane's controlled passion and having no space otherwise in the Victorian society, Bertha Mason has to die. Brontë creates a new, female space through her use of gothic to articulate the "bright visions" of her mind's eye for which anticipates being "called discontented." She succeeds in doing so, and at the same time, realistically depicts the condition of women in Victorian England through the genre of the Female Gothic.

Gordon, Allan. "Dreams in Jane Eyre." Brown University, 2004. Victorian Web, n.d. Web. 3Mar. 2013.

Gupta, Pallavi. "Hunger, Rebellion and Rgae: A Feminist Reading of Jane Eyre" Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre. Ed. Novy Kapadia. Delhi: Worldview Publications,2007. 485-496. Print.

Heilman, Robert. "Charlotte Brontë's 'New' Gothic."

Mago, Darpan. "Jane Eyre as a Critic on Victorian Society." N.d. Answers.com.

Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar. The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth Century Literary Imagination. 2 nd Ed. Nota Bene, 2000. Print.

Showalter, Elaine. "Charlotte Brontë: Feminine Heroine." Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre. Ed. Novy Kapadia. Delhi: Worldview Publications, 2007. 425-434. Print.

Smith, Andrew. Gothic Literature. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007. Print.

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Charlotte Brontë invests gothic elements in Jane Eyre with a symbolic meaning to create a new, 'female' language. It is through this female Gothic language that Brontë creates a heroine whose autobiographical mode of writing is used to trace a story of female rebellion and search for identity.

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Ever since its original emergence, Gothic fiction has been shaped by a unique narrative direction that is often described by scholars and readers alike as retrospective, repetitive, or circular in nature. Gothic texts progress as if through a series of flashbacks, always reviving deeds of the past in order to point out a problem, which, however strongly rooted in some ancient heritage, prevails in the present and calls for immediate resolution. David B. Morris defines the typically Gothic vision of history as one where "the past interpenetrates the present time, as if events were never entirely the unique and unrepeated product of human choices, but rather the replication of an unknown or buried pattern" (Morris 304). A similar view on progression is depicted, quite visually, by Charlotte Perkins Gilman's short story "The Yellow Wallpaper," in which the very pattern chosen for the famous tapestry follows a similarly transgressive, circular direction, as described by the narrator of the tale:

You think you have mastered it, but just as you get well underway in following, it turns a back-somersault and there you are. It slaps you in the face, knocks you down, and tramples upon you. It is like a bad dream. (Gilman 9)

The curious dynamism that Gilman's narrator points out here matches the narrative pattern, as well as the historical perspective, one may find in most Gothic tales. This unique discursive tendency, which is characterized by literary 'back-somersaults' and which could be referred to as 'the Gothic loop,' has become a key feature of the Gothic tradition and is perhaps one of the most underlying structural principles any Gothic text relies upon in its rendering of fictional events.

Within the frame of the 'Gothic loop' a previously repressed event of the past suddenly imposes itself upon the present and - in an attempt to haunt the minds of the protagonists until they submit to face the challenge which the processing of that past memory has to offer - refuses to leave.

The Gothic narrative loop-as it could be termed-is thus curved by a forceful intrusion of past events into the protagonist's present-day reality. Its emergence carries several literary functions, the most crucial being the evocation of a highly active, even dramatic form of melancholy reverie. Through that, the past-often presented as a site burdened with historical and/or personal crisis-not only regains its sense of immediacy and relevance, but also acquires a revised perspective. This intellectually fruitful effect of the temporal loop has been rediscovered by several authors of the Gothic convention who frequently utilize the retrospective direction of Gothic narratives for a particularly interesting purpose, that of personal and socio-cultural trauma reenactments. By considering the novel Kindred by Octavia E. Butler from a Gothic perspective, it is my goal to discuss the nature of the Gothic loop, with a special focus on its potential to reshape cultural and historical identities (especially ones having been subject to historical traumas) through a series of literary revisitations. I would also like to suggest that once identifying the temporal loop as a structure able to encompass the central problematic of the traditional Gothic tale, it becomes possible, and even necessary, to re-evaluate the heavily criticized and frequently devalued repetitiveness of Gothic texts.

The Haunted House, oil on canvas by John Atkinson Grimshaw (1874)

As it appears then, the Gothic loop could be defined as a discursive element, a fictional time and space of various suspensions when/where certain past or present traumas must be continuously re-experienced and finally resolved-with horror and suffering involved on the part of the protagonists-in order to produce an improved (re)starting point in the narrative. Within the frame of the Gothic loop a previously repressed event of the past suddenly imposes itself upon the present and refuses to leave in an attempt to haunt the minds of the protagonists until they submit to face the challenge which the processing of that past memory has to offer.

Consider how, for instance, in Toni Morrison's Beloved the past literally walks into the protagonists' present time, in the form of an incarnated ghost (not coincidentally arriving at the time of the carnival season), bringing a host of unwelcome memories with herself that neither main character Sethe, nor her family are, at first, ready to resolve. Their home, Bluestone Road 124, is described as a space condemned to an eternal state of temporal suspension, with its inhabitants unable to move forward in their lives due to the repetitively haunting presence of former events.

The act of moving becomes a crucial, recurrent motif of the novel and also a seemingly impossible aim for the characters themselves. When Sethe proposes the idea of leaving the house behind, the answer she receives from Baby Suggs formulates the central crisis of their story: "What'd be the point?" Baby Suggs replies, "Not a house in the country ain't packed to its rafters with some dead Negro's grief. We lucky this ghost is a baby" (5). Moving in a physical sense does not provide a solution to the kind of haunting Morrison's characters experience. What is really required is a form of psychological movement; a liberation of one's identity from a past whose unresolved matters deprive the self from its own legitimacy within the present time. Sethe has memories, even re-memories of her past (a concept that refers not merely to a repetition of memory, but to a practice of extremely involved re-experiencing), but she is unable to conceive of a future as long as her character is defined by an ever-returning, aggressively present personal history. Thus, Morrison's characters decide to turn to the past, and the more their story evolves in the course of the novel, the further they venture back in time to the heart of their present-day problems.

While often found as an underlying narrative direction, the Gothic loop can also be recognized in the Gothic tendency of repetitions. The Gothic genre itself progresses in a looping pattern, periodically reviving itself and returning to its previous concerns whose resolution seems to call for constant and numerous reiterations. Since imagery, character stereotypes, settings and even plotlines tend to imitate each other in Gothic discourse, the genre, especially its early form, has gained a negative fame for being too predictable and static, the kind of popular literature that could be summarized on the basis of an inventory of necessary tropes. While the Gothic literary style has, without doubt, adopted a habit of self-repetition, it is important to point out that whatever is being continuously refrained by Gothic narratives in such a compulsive manner is repeated not simply for the sake of mere entertainment, but for a more complex, generic reason.

In my analysis I want to focus primarily on narrative loops, disregarding other forms of repetition, such as repetitions of character types or other frequent tropes. One of my main concerns is to consider the various factors that differentiate Gothic loops from similar narrative structures present in other literary traditions. In other words, it is crucial to find the specifically Gothic aspect of such temporal narrative loops in order to account for their recurrent use in Gothic discourse. Additionally, this study also endeavors to examine one particularly significant feature of the Gothic loop, namely, its potential ability to provide a literary space for trauma reenactments and dramatic performances of one's historical, cultural and personal identity. Continued on Next Page "

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Trauma Reenactment in the Gothic Loop: A Study on Structures of Circularity in Gothic Fiction

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Ever since its original emergence, Gothic fiction has been shaped by a unique narrative direction that is often described by scholars and readers alike as retrospective, repetitive, or circular in nature.

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Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray, Bram Stoker's Dracula, and Robert Louis Stevenson's Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde are all "Democratic Age" 1 novels that evoke a theme of appearance versus reality. In Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray, this motif physically materializes in the form of the canvas of Dorian Gray, superficially a beautiful, charming and wealthy young man. Similarly, a physical depiction of this theme is shown via the vehicle of Count Dracula, an alluring vampire with a corrupting influence, and his interactions with other characters. By the same token, Stevenson's Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde elucidates the dichotomy between looks and actuality through dual personalities, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. This theme of appearance versus reality manifests itself in the nuances of each work and provides an avenues to explore ideas of corruption in society.

In Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray, the canvas of Dorian Gray provides a physical manifestation of the reality of his moral degradation. Initially, just as Dorian begins to commit terrible deeds such as treating Sibyl Vane, his lover, cruelly, the painting undergoes a slow transformation:

"Finally, he came back, went over to the picture, and examined it...The expression looked different. One would have said that there was a touch of cruelty in the mouth...The quivering ardent sunlight showed him the lines of cruelty round the mouth as clearly as if he had been looking into a mirror after he had done some dreadful thing" (Wilde Ch. 7).

The canvas reflects his horrible exploits: as Dorian's purity is sullied by evil actions, the canvas deteriorates. The painting, in essence, absorbs his sins, thereby becoming tarnished. This discrepancy between Dorian Gray's impeccable, youthful, handsome appearance and his actual monstrous interior raises the theme of appearance versus reality.

In addition, the juxtaposition between Dorian and his self-portrait provides a vehicle through which the reader can understand corruption in society. When Dorian first recognizes that his wish to remain youthful has been realized, the reader notices, after suspension of disbelief of the supernatural, that Dorian is actually more corrupt than, prima facie, evident. Though Dorian appears to be devoid of physical signs of evil, his portrait becomes increasingly sinister with every crime he commits, as he notes, "It was perfectly true. The portrait had altered" (Wilde Ch. 8).

In essence, the canvas physically represents his conscience and appears to bear the brunt of his immoral behavior. Wilde even explicitly states that this canvas is a "visible symbol of the degradation of sin" (Wilde Ch. 8) and "an ever-present sign of the ruin men brought upon their souls" (Wilde Ch. 8). In so doing, he says that the painting is directly linked to both the corruption of Dorian's soul and moral degradation of man in general. Thus, Wilde manages to incorporate superficial appearance and reality into his work through physical manifestation in order to elucidate how individuals in society can mask their sins and desires.

Wilde continues to juxtapose Dorian's appearance to the physical condition of the canvas in order to emphasize how corruption can be hidden - in the form of a canvas in an attic - in society. For example, after Dorian squanders twenty years destroying people's lives, his canvas depicts "hideous lines" (Wilde Ch. 11) across a "wrinkling forehead or crawled around the heavy sensual mouth" (Wilde Ch. 11). Wilde also notes the contrast between Dorian's "white hands" (Wilde Ch. 11) and the "coarse bloated hands of the picture" (Wilde Ch. 11).

This blatant distinction between appearance and reality serve to explore the concept of corruption, as corruption seems to solely manifest itself in the canvas, which physically represents actuality, rather than Dorian himself. Thus, this theme allows the reader to explore the embodiment of corruption, typically hidden below the surface, within society.

Oscar Wilde continues to examine looks and actuality, particularly when he illustrates how readily outer beauty is associated with goodness. Dorian's appearance immediately causes individuals to question the widely circulating reports of his wicked behavior, given the incongruity between those deeds and Dorian's innocent appearance. Characters such as Basil Howard, an old friend of Dorian Gray, view Dorian's youthful and naive countenance as an accurate reflection of his worth and character.

For example, Basil remarks, "'sin is a thing that writes itself across a man's face. It cannot be concealed'" (Wilde Ch. 12), thereby implying that Dorian would never be capable of such sin, given his virtuous appearance. However, he, among others, fails to look beyond the surface and see Dorian Gray for what he truly has become: a monster. Accordingly, Wilde raises this theme so as to reveal how Dorian's corruption is not always physically evident and, interestingly, can be masked by appearance.

In Bram Stoker's Dracula, the title character is depicted as polite and courteous, especially upon the arrival of his lawyer, Mr. Harker, to his home. Dracula warmly greets Mr. Harker, as the former states, "'I bid you welcome, Mr. Harker, to my house. Come in; the night air is chill, and you must need to eat and rest'" (Stoker Ch. 2). Dracula reacts to Harker's arrival with human-like qualities such as sympathy and concern. The count appears to be a hospitable man with good intentions, but later on, the reality of his intent manifests itself, as Dracula actually aims to keep Harker prisoner in his castle.

Harker serves as a vehicle through which the reader can understand Dracula's true nature. For example, upon exploring Dracula's castle, Harker notes, "I explored further; doors, doors, doors everywhere, and all locked and bolted. In no place save from the windows in the castle walls is there an available exit. The castle is a veritable prison, and I am a prisoner!" (Stoker, Ch. 2). As evidenced by this statement, Dracula goes to extreme measures to confine Harker, thereby evincing his true evil nature.

The discrepancy between appearance and truth is continually elucidated, as Harker discovers that he cannot see Dracula when he looks in the mirror: "This time there could be no error, for the man was close to me, and I could see him over my shoulder. But there was no reflection of him in the mirror! The whole room behind me was displayed; but there was no sign of a man in it, except myself" (Stoker Ch. 2). The mirror conveys reality in the sense that Dracula is a supernatural creature and not a human being. Although the mirror reflects the truth, however, Dracula's personal appearance is masked by his civility, as demonstrated by his "good-morning" (Stoker Ch. 2) salutation and his "courtly bow" (Stoker Ch. 2) towards Harker the previous day. Moreover, Dracula's vampire-like qualities are hidden by his deceptively courteous behavior. This juxtaposition between that which is real versus feigned allows the reader to explore how corruption, typically hidden, can manifest itself in society.

Upon accidentally cutting himself with his razor, Harker's notion that something about Dracula inspires a strange uneasiness is only reinforced: "but at the instant I saw that the cut had bled a little, and the blood was trickling over my chin...When the Count saw my face, his eyes blazed with a sort of demoniac fury, and he suddenly made a grab at my throat" (Stoker Ch. 2). Dracula's eyes reveal his intentions, as his thirst for Harker's blood becomes blatantly obvious. Dracula's vampirism is exposed through his aggressive lust for Harker's bodily fluid; accordingly, this scene evokes the theme of appearance versus reality, as Dracula's initially deferential greetings morph into violent and corrupt deeds. Thus, Stoker aptly illustrates how not only corruption can lurk beneath the surface but also how looks can belie truth.

Dracula further reveals his malevolent plans for Harker, as he objectifies Harker and plans to eventually dispose of him. Dracula even promises his mistress vampires that he will hand over Harker to them: "Well, now I promise you that when I am done with him you shall kiss him at your will" (Stoker, Ch. 3). Dracula essentially avers that his mistress vampires can do as they please with Harker once the latter is no longer of any use to him. As the Count cruelly plans to dispose of Harker, he is thereby depicted as a callous and cold-blooded figure. This characterization only further magnifies the incongruity between Dracula's earlier façade and his true nature.

By the same token, Dracula's discloses his depraved character when he manipulates Harker into remaining prisoner. Dracula aims to accomplish his goal by threatening Harker with vicious, hungry wolves, in reaction to which Harker soon responds, "I was to be given to the wolves, and at my own instigation. There was a diabolical wickedness in the idea great enough for the count, and as a last chance I cried out:-'Shut the door; I shall wait till morning!'" (Stoker Ch. 4).

As evidenced by this statement, Dracula cleverly places a physical obstacle before Harker, thereby causing Harker to temporarily surrender his fight for freedom - ultimately, the prospect of death looming over his head simply outweighs the prisoner's desire to escape. Dracula's overtly cruel deed qualifies him as a malevolent creature who, contrary to what his initial polite behavior might suggest, is very sinister. Moreover, this contrast between appearance and reality physically is conveyed in the form of Dracula, as he feigns politeness, thereby appearing considerate, whereas, in reality, he is a cruel, corruptible individual.

Furthermore, though Dracula ostensibly exudes kindness and moral decency, he, on the contrary, proves to be a destructive and noxious influence, particularly on Lucy Westenra, a youthful, innocent and pure woman. When Dracula drinks Lucy's blood and turns her into a vampire, he demonstrates his corrupting effect on her: "Her breathing grew stertorous, the mouth opened, and the pale gums, drawn back, made the teeth look longer and sharper than ever...she opened her eyes, which were now dull and hard at once, and said in a soft, voluptuous voice, such as I had never heard from her lips:-"Arthur! Oh, my love, I am so glad you have come! Kiss me!" (Stoker Ch. 12).

Dracula causes Lucy to undergo a drastic behavioral transformation from pure to promiscuous. Lucy becomes less and less human-like, as evidenced by the "canines," owing to Dracula's actions. Dracula corrupts Lucy by robbing her of her humanity and ultimately catalyzes her demise, as he continues to drain Lucy of her blood, evidenced by the "horribly white and mangled" "two little wounds" on her bare throat (Stoker Ch. 12). In essence, Dracula is responsible for her deteriorating condition. Moreover, Stoker contrasts Dracula's appearance with his intentions in order to explore the corruptibility of individuals and how facades can beguile people and disguise true motives. Continued on Next Page "

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Exploring the Corruption of the Soul in the Works of Oscar Wilde, Bram Stoker, and Robert Louis Stevenson

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Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray, Bram Stoker's Dracula, and Robert Louis Stevenson's Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde are all "Democratic Age" 1 novels that evoke a theme of appearance versus reality. In Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray, this motif physically materializes in the form of the canvas of Dorian Gray, superficially a beautiful, charming and wealthy young man.

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Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray, Bram Stoker's Dracula, and Robert Louis Stevenson's Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde are all "Democratic Age" 1 novels that evoke a theme of appearance versus reality. In Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray, this motif physically materializes in the form of the canvas of Dorian Gray, superficially a beautiful, charming and wealthy young man. Similarly, a physical depiction of this theme is shown via the vehicle of Count Dracula, an alluring vampire with a corrupting influence, and his interactions with other characters. By the same token, Stevenson's Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde elucidates the dichotomy between looks and actuality through dual personalities, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. This theme of appearance versus reality manifests itself in the nuances of each work and provides an avenues to explore ideas of corruption in society.

In Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray, the canvas of Dorian Gray provides a physical manifestation of the reality of his moral degradation. Initially, just as Dorian begins to commit terrible deeds such as treating Sibyl Vane, his lover, cruelly, the painting undergoes a slow transformation:

"Finally, he came back, went over to the picture, and examined it...The expression looked different. One would have said that there was a touch of cruelty in the mouth...The quivering ardent sunlight showed him the lines of cruelty round the mouth as clearly as if he had been looking into a mirror after he had done some dreadful thing" (Wilde Ch. 7).

The canvas reflects his horrible exploits: as Dorian's purity is sullied by evil actions, the canvas deteriorates. The painting, in essence, absorbs his sins, thereby becoming tarnished. This discrepancy between Dorian Gray's impeccable, youthful, handsome appearance and his actual monstrous interior raises the theme of appearance versus reality.

In addition, the juxtaposition between Dorian and his self-portrait provides a vehicle through which the reader can understand corruption in society. When Dorian first recognizes that his wish to remain youthful has been realized, the reader notices, after suspension of disbelief of the supernatural, that Dorian is actually more corrupt than, prima facie, evident. Though Dorian appears to be devoid of physical signs of evil, his portrait becomes increasingly sinister with every crime he commits, as he notes, "It was perfectly true. The portrait had altered" (Wilde Ch. 8).

In essence, the canvas physically represents his conscience and appears to bear the brunt of his immoral behavior. Wilde even explicitly states that this canvas is a "visible symbol of the degradation of sin" (Wilde Ch. 8) and "an ever-present sign of the ruin men brought upon their souls" (Wilde Ch. 8). In so doing, he says that the painting is directly linked to both the corruption of Dorian's soul and moral degradation of man in general. Thus, Wilde manages to incorporate superficial appearance and reality into his work through physical manifestation in order to elucidate how individuals in society can mask their sins and desires.

Wilde continues to juxtapose Dorian's appearance to the physical condition of the canvas in order to emphasize how corruption can be hidden - in the form of a canvas in an attic - in society. For example, after Dorian squanders twenty years destroying people's lives, his canvas depicts "hideous lines" (Wilde Ch. 11) across a "wrinkling forehead or crawled around the heavy sensual mouth" (Wilde Ch. 11). Wilde also notes the contrast between Dorian's "white hands" (Wilde Ch. 11) and the "coarse bloated hands of the picture" (Wilde Ch. 11).

This blatant distinction between appearance and reality serve to explore the concept of corruption, as corruption seems to solely manifest itself in the canvas, which physically represents actuality, rather than Dorian himself. Thus, this theme allows the reader to explore the embodiment of corruption, typically hidden below the surface, within society.

Oscar Wilde continues to examine looks and actuality, particularly when he illustrates how readily outer beauty is associated with goodness. Dorian's appearance immediately causes individuals to question the widely circulating reports of his wicked behavior, given the incongruity between those deeds and Dorian's innocent appearance. Characters such as Basil Howard, an old friend of Dorian Gray, view Dorian's youthful and naive countenance as an accurate reflection of his worth and character.

For example, Basil remarks, "'sin is a thing that writes itself across a man's face. It cannot be concealed'" (Wilde Ch. 12), thereby implying that Dorian would never be capable of such sin, given his virtuous appearance. However, he, among others, fails to look beyond the surface and see Dorian Gray for what he truly has become: a monster. Accordingly, Wilde raises this theme so as to reveal how Dorian's corruption is not always physically evident and, interestingly, can be masked by appearance.

In Bram Stoker's Dracula, the title character is depicted as polite and courteous, especially upon the arrival of his lawyer, Mr. Harker, to his home. Dracula warmly greets Mr. Harker, as the former states, "'I bid you welcome, Mr. Harker, to my house. Come in; the night air is chill, and you must need to eat and rest'" (Stoker Ch. 2). Dracula reacts to Harker's arrival with human-like qualities such as sympathy and concern. The count appears to be a hospitable man with good intentions, but later on, the reality of his intent manifests itself, as Dracula actually aims to keep Harker prisoner in his castle.

Harker serves as a vehicle through which the reader can understand Dracula's true nature. For example, upon exploring Dracula's castle, Harker notes, "I explored further; doors, doors, doors everywhere, and all locked and bolted. In no place save from the windows in the castle walls is there an available exit. The castle is a veritable prison, and I am a prisoner!" (Stoker, Ch. 2). As evidenced by this statement, Dracula goes to extreme measures to confine Harker, thereby evincing his true evil nature.

The discrepancy between appearance and truth is continually elucidated, as Harker discovers that he cannot see Dracula when he looks in the mirror: "This time there could be no error, for the man was close to me, and I could see him over my shoulder. But there was no reflection of him in the mirror! The whole room behind me was displayed; but there was no sign of a man in it, except myself" (Stoker Ch. 2). The mirror conveys reality in the sense that Dracula is a supernatural creature and not a human being. Although the mirror reflects the truth, however, Dracula's personal appearance is masked by his civility, as demonstrated by his "good-morning" (Stoker Ch. 2) salutation and his "courtly bow" (Stoker Ch. 2) towards Harker the previous day. Moreover, Dracula's vampire-like qualities are hidden by his deceptively courteous behavior. This juxtaposition between that which is real versus feigned allows the reader to explore how corruption, typically hidden, can manifest itself in society.

Upon accidentally cutting himself with his razor, Harker's notion that something about Dracula inspires a strange uneasiness is only reinforced: "but at the instant I saw that the cut had bled a little, and the blood was trickling over my chin...When the Count saw my face, his eyes blazed with a sort of demoniac fury, and he suddenly made a grab at my throat" (Stoker Ch. 2). Dracula's eyes reveal his intentions, as his thirst for Harker's blood becomes blatantly obvious. Dracula's vampirism is exposed through his aggressive lust for Harker's bodily fluid; accordingly, this scene evokes the theme of appearance versus reality, as Dracula's initially deferential greetings morph into violent and corrupt deeds. Thus, Stoker aptly illustrates how not only corruption can lurk beneath the surface but also how looks can belie truth.

Dracula further reveals his malevolent plans for Harker, as he objectifies Harker and plans to eventually dispose of him. Dracula even promises his mistress vampires that he will hand over Harker to them: "Well, now I promise you that when I am done with him you shall kiss him at your will" (Stoker, Ch. 3). Dracula essentially avers that his mistress vampires can do as they please with Harker once the latter is no longer of any use to him. As the Count cruelly plans to dispose of Harker, he is thereby depicted as a callous and cold-blooded figure. This characterization only further magnifies the incongruity between Dracula's earlier façade and his true nature.

By the same token, Dracula's discloses his depraved character when he manipulates Harker into remaining prisoner. Dracula aims to accomplish his goal by threatening Harker with vicious, hungry wolves, in reaction to which Harker soon responds, "I was to be given to the wolves, and at my own instigation. There was a diabolical wickedness in the idea great enough for the count, and as a last chance I cried out:-'Shut the door; I shall wait till morning!'" (Stoker Ch. 4).

As evidenced by this statement, Dracula cleverly places a physical obstacle before Harker, thereby causing Harker to temporarily surrender his fight for freedom - ultimately, the prospect of death looming over his head simply outweighs the prisoner's desire to escape. Dracula's overtly cruel deed qualifies him as a malevolent creature who, contrary to what his initial polite behavior might suggest, is very sinister. Moreover, this contrast between appearance and reality physically is conveyed in the form of Dracula, as he feigns politeness, thereby appearing considerate, whereas, in reality, he is a cruel, corruptible individual.

Furthermore, though Dracula ostensibly exudes kindness and moral decency, he, on the contrary, proves to be a destructive and noxious influence, particularly on Lucy Westenra, a youthful, innocent and pure woman. When Dracula drinks Lucy's blood and turns her into a vampire, he demonstrates his corrupting effect on her: "Her breathing grew stertorous, the mouth opened, and the pale gums, drawn back, made the teeth look longer and sharper than ever...she opened her eyes, which were now dull and hard at once, and said in a soft, voluptuous voice, such as I had never heard from her lips:-"Arthur! Oh, my love, I am so glad you have come! Kiss me!" (Stoker Ch. 12).

Dracula causes Lucy to undergo a drastic behavioral transformation from pure to promiscuous. Lucy becomes less and less human-like, as evidenced by the "canines," owing to Dracula's actions. Dracula corrupts Lucy by robbing her of her humanity and ultimately catalyzes her demise, as he continues to drain Lucy of her blood, evidenced by the "horribly white and mangled" "two little wounds" on her bare throat (Stoker Ch. 12). In essence, Dracula is responsible for her deteriorating condition. Moreover, Stoker contrasts Dracula's appearance with his intentions in order to explore the corruptibility of individuals and how facades can beguile people and disguise true motives. Continued on Next Page "

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Exploring the Corruption of the Soul in the Works of Oscar Wilde, Bram Stoker, and Robert Louis Stevenson

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Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray, Bram Stoker's Dracula, and Robert Louis Stevenson's Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde are all "Democratic Age" 1 novels that evoke a theme of appearance versus reality. In Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray, this motif physically materializes in the form of the canvas of Dorian Gray, superficially a beautiful, charming and wealthy young man.

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Gothic Romance and Women's Reality in Jane Eyre

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Gothic Romance and Women's Reality in Jane Eyre

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The Italian by Ann RADCLIFFE  P 1 | Romance, Horror, Mystery | AudioBook Full Unabridged

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Daphne du Maurier

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Mary Shelley

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Bram Stoker

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As Halloween and a nationwide BFI gothic season approaches, Mark Kermode selects 10 films that give good goth. The four-month programme of films and events for Gothic: the Dark Heart of Film includes 150 titles shown at around 1,000 screenings across the UK, with possessed children, haunted houses and lust-crazed vampires aplenty

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As Halloween and a nationwide BFI gothic season approaches, Mark Kermode selects 10 films that give good goth.

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The devil's work: gothic films at the BFI 

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The devil's work: gothic films at the BFI 

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eyond high castle walls, the wolves howl. The Count intones: "Listen to them! The children of the night! What music they make!" And those words usher you into a faintly ludicrous cosiness, the comfortable darkness of gothic. For gothic properties are altogether snug, as familiar as Halloween costumes - a Boris Karloff mask, the Bela Lugosi cape, an Elsa Lanchester wig. So it is that many of us first come to the form through its parodies; I knew Carry On Screaming! by heart before I saw my first Hammer film. And yet, within the homely restfulness, something genuinely disturbing lurks; an authentic dread. And watching these films again, we find behind both the security and the horror something we perhaps did not expect - a visionary poetry motivating it all.

Gothic is one of Britain's greatest cultural exports, moving quickly to Germany, then Ireland, then America, and then much of the world. The form originated in the 18th-century novels of Horace Walpole and Ann Radcliffe, set far from England in a historically remote, dream version of Catholic Europe. Then came the 19th century's series of gloomy fables: Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, James Hogg's Confessions of a Justified Sinner, Robert Louis Stevenson's The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray, Bram Stoker's Dracula, and the marvellous ghost stories of Charles Dickens, Sheridan Le Fanu, Henry James and MR James. Over the last 100 years, gothic film has meant first of all the screening of these archetypal tales, and then the adaptation of their mythic spirit to modern life's still darker rigours.

A suspicion lingers among some that gothic answers only to the teenager's melodramatic instincts ( TS Eliot diagnosed a taste for Edgar Allan Poe as fatally adolescent), its terrors as ultimately unserious as saying "Boo!". Yet gothic remains one of the best ways to explore what frightens us - our large undeniable experiences of loneliness, death, and personal or collective guilt. This apparently tawdry and peripheral form contains a hallucinatory history of the modern self. It brings to mind the fears we know, those we suppress and those we ought to have. Gothic performs this work through returning us to other, less palpable fears, the atavistic mind caught by images of dread or doom: a shadowy staircase; the playing fields at dusk; a discarded doll; the silence in an attic room.

The gothic is only one kind of fantasy film, close to fairytale, and (though they share a border) distinct from the horror movie that it may be said to have spawned. (It is surprising how little actual violence there is in the best gothic films.) It presents an infected realism, one where the everyday facts of life are unhinged by an intervention from elsewhere. Through such disturbance, anything can come to seem gothic, though the more intimate and ordinary the better.

Towards the end of his career, the excellent late-Victorian gothic writer, Arthur Machen looked back on his work. He saw that he had been trying to capture the revelation of spiritual beauty he had found as a child in the physical landscape of Wales. And he regretted that in attempting to write something of that wonder, he had recast the numinous as dark and malevolent. Gothic had presented a way to express his sense of wonder, but had perversely manifested that wonder as wickedness. So it is that all gothic films - some of the finest movies ever made - raise the question as to whether dread can contain a form of visionary beauty. For gothic is one of the few places where our culture allows for the ineffable, for that which does not fit our reasonable schemes. Yet it does so by finding pleasure in the apparently unpleasurable, attraction in disgust and beguilement in fear. Part of the meaning of a film such as The Curse of Frankenstein is that the villain doesn't feel things as a sane, thoughtful person should, but resembles instead a cool surgeon, a scientist, a hardened killer. The irony is that we are invited to share these responses, not to feel too much disgust - to look, and not turn away.

To 19th-century writers, a fiction of supernatural terror was a "German tale", and so it is entirely appropriate that the first great wave of gothic classic films were, likewise, German: Robert Wiene's The Cabinet of Dr Caligari (1919), Paul Wegener's (1920), FW Murnau's astonishing Nosferatu (1921) and Faust (1926), and Danish director's Carl Theodor Dreyer's superb German-French production, (1932). These are old movies, but they are far from naive; even the makeshift quality of their special effects adds to their uncanniness, like a haunted doll's house, or, as in Faust, an atmosphere of some mechanical skeleton-riddled Renaissance Rathaus clock. People looking for slick shock will be disappointed; the virtue of these films lies in the "streamy", associative way in which they tell their tales, communicating strangeness through a succession of irrationally interconnected images. It was this mode - in which film could come to seem a form of trance - that the Germans bequeathed to all the best of their gothic successors.

After the great silent gothic films, the baton passed to Hollywood and Universal Studios, as the meeting point for a number of European talents: Brits in exile such as Karloff and James Whale, and German migrants such as the German cinematographer, Karl Freund. Whale's two Frankenstein films and Tod Browning's Dracula (1931) play out in an imagined Mitteleuropa, replete with moustachioed landlords and peasants in lederhosen or dirndls. In Dracula, an insipidly urbane modernity is seduced by the over-acting that signals the lost past. In the chaos on set during the making of that film, Freund took over, and he is certainly responsible for its wistful, faded charm, best glimpsed in the mysterious fleeting shots of Dracula's white-clad brides. But Universal's tour de force, and one of the greatest films of the 1930s, is Whale's Bride of Frankenstein (1935), a movie that begins with Lord Byron declaring his delight in Mary Shelley's "pretty chills", and that explicitly sets out to expose the darkness in such prettiness. It is both the most vicious of the Universal horrors and, not coincidentally, the campest and funniest. A vein of ironic and grotesque fancy runs through it, tinged with Wildean subversions. Karloff's Monster is alternately childlike in his curiosity and bestial in his rage; he lurches between being a source of terror and an object of pity.

Gothic began with exotic locales set in the distant past; one of the Victorian period's innovations was to draw this alien otherness back to Britain itself, to the here and now. This discovered gothic quality within everyday life found one of its finest expressions in the American work of French-born director Jacques Tourneur, especially the brilliant Cat People (1943), Curse of the Cat People (1944) and Night of the Demon (1957). All three films present a character unable to credit the supernatural, or even suspicious of the imagination as such. In Cat People, our hero Ollie (Kent Smith) is an apple-pie-eating, all-American, chisel-jawed guy. His unreflecting faith in enlightenment, progress and psychiatry contends with the archetypal, the superstitious, the fact of human evil. European heaviness in the shape of Irena ( Simone Simon), his Serbian cat-woman wife, drags this chipper American down; for the first time in his life, Ollie is unhappy. "I love silence. I love loneliness," purrs Simone Simon. There is no pursuit of happiness for her. Irena believes her trouble is one of the soul, an unfortunate property that no American in this movie would want the inconvenience of possessing. (The idea of the soul captivates gothic films from Dracula to The Devil Rides Out, though most tend to express that fascination through ssaults on the body, achieving carnality in sexual desire or in gore.) Troubled by Irena's Balkan heaviness, tempted by normality, Ollie strays romantically; this must be one of the few films of marital infidelity where the other woman is a breezy, swell type of home-making gal, and the wife seems an unreadable femme fatale.

There have always been good British supernatural films - Ealing Studios' Dead of Night (1945) and Thorold Dickinson's The Queen of Spades (1949) are particularly impressive. Yet for most people, British horror means Hammer. When Hammer Studios turned to the horror movie in the late 1950s, to distinguish themselves from their Universal forebears they presented not black and white darkness, but brightness. Shot in Eastmancolor, the first batch of Hammer Horror movies - Terence Fisher's The Curse of Frankenstein (1957), Dracula (1958) and (1959) - are among the loveliest-looking British films of the decade. If this is horror, it's one closer to Poe's decadence than to . The early Hammer films offer a last gasp of British romanticism, the solid sets drenched in a soft brilliance of shadows, of greys, reds and blues; when these films stray into the far woods, it's always autumn there, never spring. The leaves fall, and the light shines golden and clear; compared with the well-lit contemporary look of the "angry young men" films, Hammer's mournful sumptuousness must have been even more striking. They play out a 1950s reverie of contagion, lust and post-Suez anxiety. Questions of guilt circulate in these films, where the virtuous can be transformed into vampires through one moment of sexual weakness; Profumo and Dirk Bogarde in (1961) are waiting at the next corner. The great Hammer films (and to me, they do seem great) are not terrifying, they're melancholy. They're in a low shared by many realist British films of the time, dejected by a wistful sense of life's limited possibilities. Although in Hammer the constraints of ordinary life are off, the dejection lingers.

Roger Corman's 1960s American gothic films - especially his stylish series of very loose Edgar Allan Poe adaptations, blessed by the presence of the wonderful Vincent Price - have more lurid vitality than their British rivals. Yet even here we may detect a shade of Ingmar Bergman, another sign that through that decade, European existential downheartedness would win out over American gusto. Arguably, the best American gothic film of the period was directed by a Pole - Roman Polanski's Rosemary's Baby (1968). The great gothic fear is helplessness, that we might be victimised and dominated; for young Rosemary, this is a matter of being bullied and cajoled, her pregnancy taken from her and her body alienated from herself, and turned into the victim of a witches' conspiracy by her husband and elderly neighbours.

That same year, here in Britain, Terence Fisher's The Devil Rides Out portrayed comparable fears, the young becoming the hypnotised prey of a warlock of a certain age. The satanic rite at this film's centre is pretty much how Ronald Reagan imagined one of Ken Kesey's Acid Tests. However, the Dionysiac celebrants at this orgiastic 60s happening aren't beautiful hippies, but late-middle-aged suburbanites. The stockbroker belt turns out to be holding in a lot of disruptive desires.

In the era of The Manchurian Candidate, the anxieties expressed in Rosemary are found everywhere; with the similarly pregnant heroine of John Bowen's interesting BBC play, Robin Redbreast (1970), just as with Edward Woodward's entrapped puritan policeman in the Anthony Shaffer-scripted The Wicker Man (1973). Gothic requires victims, and, above all, inexplicably semi-willing ones; it is not just being taken over that provides the terror, but our knowledge of our collsion in the process, our inner compulsion to give ourselves over to desire, to death. Gothic tenders us a porous self, susceptible to invasion, where our subconscious mind is our private Fifth Column. In vampire films, the "victim" is a kind of addict, consciously repelled, unconsciously attracted. Through the best gothic stories, sleepwalkers, the mesmerised, the entranced and enchanted, stalk. The 60s and 70s could connect their radical absence of will to mind control, propaganda and the hidden persuasion of advertising; with brainwashing, the world had gone gothic. And with some of the advances in brain-scanning and nanotechnology, it looks set to stay that way.

In the 1970s, the finest purveyor of British gothic was no longer Hammer but the BBC. TV and radio were then, after all, the uncanniest of all the media - the stranger within the home. In a series of fantastic short films for Christmas, as well as in such anthology series as Dead of Night, the BBC (and especially Lawrence Gordon Clark) turned out a number of small masterpieces: Jonathan Miller's Whistle and I'll Come to You (1968), Gordon Clark's The Signalman - Dickens adapted by Andrew Davies - (1976) and Leslie Megahey's Schalcken the Painter (1979) especially stand out. The entrapped self so vital to gothic was everywhere here. Much contemporary horror imposes on the mind; these great ghost stories insinuate themselves into the imagination. The stories proceed by implication, by hints and glimpses; things turn on fractures in perception, on double-takes, on our uncertainty about what we see or hear. The fear comes from images too quick to be taken in, from sounds on the edge of notice, in the strangeness of the natural world.

In the contemporary stories, gothic became a vehicle for social criticism, especially in the admirable Dead of Night. In Don Taylor's "The Exorcism", a spectre is haunting a home counties middle-class Christmas dinner; it's a Marxist Märchen, a gothic Abigail's Party with a leftwing conscience. In John Bowen's "A Woman Sobbing", a great feminist fable, the fear coalesces around the woe that is within marriage.

In the cinema of this era, there are so many great works that it is hard to do more than list some of the very best - The Exorcist, or The Shining, all movies that place the gothic at the heart of modern life. Yet, in my view, the finest gothic films of the period were those that most measured up to the power of the past - the place where, after all, ghosts come from. There were spirits abroad too; elemental forces from the dark ages and spooky stone circles on children's TV. Into the electric world intrude elements that displace modernity - ghosts, monsters, devil worship and, for some rationalists, religion itself. The objects of fear prove archetypal; their origins are in eternity. In one of the few cinematic remakes to bear comparison to the original, Werner Herzog's Nosferatu (1979) powerfully engages with the gothic past and with Germany's lost cultural inheritance. David Lynch's The Elephant Man (1980) is a Dickensian fairytale of London, a sombre and beautiful film, one that reminds us that gothic may provoke tears as well as shudders.

These works and others show our continuing need for the Victorians. The people of the 19th century stand both for the repression that we imagine ourselves as having refused, and for the lusts and guilt that we suppose were once repressed. In gothic, the Victorians are our necessary other, embodying all we reject, all that we hope we are not. The place of repression is the place of sex, summoned up by its opposite; as for the Victorians themselves there was medieval Dracula, troglodytic Mr Hyde. One great strength of gothic is its power to merge together the long‑ago and the troubled present. So it is that in the last decades came , Blair Witch, cool bloodshed and twilight. The form seems as vital as ever. Gothic may be unhappily in love with the past, but it undoubtedly has a rosy future. Its fears are perennial, apt for rediscovery by each generation, both in new works and in the undead images of celluloid.

* This article was amended on 26 October 2013. An earlier version of the caption for Nosferatu stated that the still came from the original 1922 film.

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The devil's work: gothic films at the BFI

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From Nosferatu to Twilight, gothic films have explored what frightens us - and why we are willing victims of our fear. A few days before Halloween, and as the BFI begins a nationwide season, Michael Newton is seduced by horror, sex and satanism

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The uncanny is the psychological experience of something as strangely familiar, rather than simply mysterious. It may describe incidents where a familiar thing or event is encountered in an unsettling, eerie, or taboo context.

Ernst Jentsch set out the concept of the uncanny later elaborated on by Sigmund Freud in his 1919 essay Das Unheimliche, which explores the eeriness of dolls and waxworks. For Freud, the uncanny locates the strangeness in the ordinary. Expanding on the idea, psychoanalytic theorist Jacques Lacan wrote that the uncanny places us "in the field where we do not know how to distinguish bad and good, pleasure from displeasure", resulting in an irreducible anxiety that gestures to the Real. The concept has since been taken up by a variety of thinkers and theorists such as roboticist Masahiro Mori's uncanny valley and Julia Kristeva's concept of abjection.[citation needed ]

Philosopher F. W. J. Schelling raised the question of the uncanny in his late Philosophie der Mythologie of 1835, postulating that the Homeric clarity was built upon a prior repression of the uncanny.

In The Will to Power manuscript, German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche refers to nihilism as "the uncanniest of all guests" and, earlier, in On the Genealogy of Morals he argues it is the "will to truth" that has destroyed the metaphysics that underpins the values of Western culture. Hence, he coins the phrase "European nihilism" to describe the condition that afflicts those Enlightenment ideals that seemingly hold strong values yet undermine themselves.

Uncanniness was first explored psychologically by Ernst Jentsch in a 1906 essay, On the Psychology of the Uncanny. Jentsch defines the Uncanny as: being a product of "...intellectual uncertainty; so that the uncanny would always, as it were, be something one does not know one's way about in. The better oriented in his environment a person is, the less readily will he get the impression of something uncanny in regard to the objects and events in it." He expands upon its use in fiction:

In telling a story one of the most successful devices for easily creating uncanny effects is to leave the reader in uncertainty whether a particular figure in the story is a human being or an automaton and to do it in such a way that his attention is not focused directly upon his uncertainty, so that he may not be led to go into the matter and clear it up immediately.

Jentsch identifies German writer E. T. A. Hoffmann as a writer who uses uncanny effects in his work, focusing specifically on Hoffmann's story "The Sandman" (" Der Sandmann"), which features a lifelike doll, Olympia.

The concept of the Uncanny was later elaborated on and developed by Sigmund Freud in his 1919 essay "The Uncanny", which also draws on the work of Hoffmann (whom Freud refers to as the "unrivalled master of the uncanny in literature"). However, he criticizes Jentsch's belief that Olympia is the central uncanny element in the story (" The Sandman"):

I cannot think - and I hope most readers of the story will agree with me - that the theme of the doll Olympia, who is to all appearances a living being, is by any means the only, or indeed the most important, element that must be held responsible for the quite unparalleled atmosphere of uncanniness evoked by the story.

Instead, Freud draws on a wholly different element of the story, namely, "the idea of being robbed of one's eyes", as the "more striking instance of uncanniness" in the tale.

Freud goes on, for the remainder of the essay, to identify uncanny effects that result from instances of "repetition of the same thing," linking the concept to that of the repetition compulsion. He includes incidents wherein one becomes lost and accidentally retraces one's steps, and instances wherein random numbers recur, seemingly meaningfully (here Freud may be said to be prefiguring the concept that Jung would later refer to as synchronicity). He also discusses the uncanny nature of Otto Rank's concept of the "double".

Freud specifically relates an aspect of the Uncanny derived from German etymology. By contrasting the German adjective unheimlich with its base word heimlich ("concealed, hidden, in secret"), he proposes that social taboo often yields an aura not only of pious reverence but even more so of horror and even disgust, as the taboo state of an item gives rise to the commonplace assumption that that which is hidden from public eye (cf. the eye or sight metaphor) must be a dangerous threat and even an abomination - especially if the concealed item is obviously or presumingly sexual in nature. Basically, the Uncanny is what unconsciously reminds us of our own , our forbidden and thus repressed impulses - especially when placed in a context of uncertainty that can remind one of infantile beliefs in the omnipotence of thought. Such uncanny elements are perceived as threatening by our ridden with oedipal guilt as it fears symbolic castration by punishment for deviating from societal norms. Thus, the items and individuals that we project our own repressed impulses upon become a most uncanny threat to us, uncanny monsters and freaks akin to fairy-tale folk-devils, and subsequently often become scapegoats we blame for all sorts of perceived miseries, calamities, and maladies.

What interests us most in this long extract is to find that among its different shades of meaning the word heimlich exhibits one which is identical with its opposite, unheimlich. What is heimlich thus comes to be unheimlich. [...] In general we are reminded that the word heimlich is not unambiguous, but belongs to two sets of ideas, which, without being contradictory, are yet very different: on the one hand it means what is familiar and agreeable, and on the other, what is concealed and kept out of sight. Unheimlich is customarily used, we are told, as the contrary only of the first signification of heimlich, and not of the second. [...] On the other hand, we notice that Schelling says something which throws quite a new light on the concept of the Unheimlich, for which we were certainly not prepared. According to him, everything is unheimlich that ought to have remained secret and hidden but has come to light.

[...]

A study of dreams, phantasies and myths has taught us that anxiety about one's eyes, the fear of going blind [as used as a central theme in "The Sandman"], is often enough a substitute for the dread of being castrated. The self-blinding of the mythical criminal, Oedipus, was simply a mitigated form of the punishment of castration - the only punishment that was adequate for him by the lex talionis. [...] All further doubts are removed when we learn the details of their 'castration complex' from the analysis of neurotic patients, and realize its immense importance in their mental life.

After Freud, Jacques Lacan, in his 1962-1963 seminar "L'angoisse" ("Anxiety"), used the Unheimlich "via regia" to enter into the territory of Angst. Lacan showed how the same image that seduces the subject, trapping him in the narcissistic impasse, may suddenly, by a contingency, show that it is dependent on something, some hidden object, and so the subject may grasp at the same time that he is not autonomous (5 December 1962). For example, and as a paradigm, Guy de Maupassant, in his story "Le Horla", describes a man who suddenly may see his own back in the mirror. His back is there, but it is deprived of the gaze of the subject. It appears as a strange object, until he feels it is his own. There is no cognitive dissonance here, we rather cross all possible cognition, to find ourselves in the field where we do not know how to distinguish bad and good, pleasure from displeasure. And this is the signal of anxiety: the signal of the real, as irreducible to any signifier.

This concept is closely related to Julia Kristeva's concept of abjection, where one reacts adversely to something forcefully cast out of the symbolic order. Abjection can be uncanny in that the observer can recognize something within the abject, possibly of what it was before it was 'cast out', yet be repulsed by what it is that caused it to be cast out to begin with. Kristeva lays special emphasis on the uncanny return of the past abject with relation to the 'uncanny stranger'.

Sadeq Rahimi has noted a common relationship between the uncanny and direct or metaphorical visual references, which he explains in terms of basic processes of ego development, specifically as developed by Lacan's theory of the mirror stage. Rahimi presents a wide range of evidence from various contexts to demonstrate how uncanny experiences are typically associated with themes and metaphors of vision, blindness, mirrors and other optical tropes. He also presents historical evidence showing strong presence of ocular and specular themes and associations in the literary and psychological tradition out of which the notion of 'the uncanny' emerged. According to Rahimi, instances of the uncanny like doppelgängers, ghosts, , alter egos, self-alienations and split personhoods, phantoms, twins, living dolls, etc. share two important features: that they are closely tied with visual tropes, and that they are variations on the theme of doubling of the ego.

Roboticist Masahiro Mori's essay on human reactions to humanlike entities, Bukimi no Tani Genshō (Valley of Eeriness Phenomenon), describes the gap between familiar living people and their also familiar inanimate representations, such as dolls, puppets, mannequins, prosthetic hands, and android robots. The entities in the valley are between these two poles of common phenomena. Mori has stated that he made the observation independently of Jentsch and Freud, though a link was forged by Reichardt and translators who rendered bukimi as uncanny.

Canny is from the Anglo-Saxon root ken: "knowledge, understanding, or cognizance; mental perception: an idea beyond one's ken." Thus the uncanny is something outside one's familiar knowledge or perceptions.

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The uncanny is the psychological experience of something as strangely familiar, rather than simply mysterious. It may describe incidents where a familiar thing or event is encountered in an unsettling, eerie, or taboo context. Ernst Jentsch set out the concept of the uncanny later elaborated on by Sigmund Freud in his 1919 essay Das Unheimliche, which explores the eeriness of dolls and waxworks.

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How Did Dracula Become The World's Most Famous Vampire?

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How Did Dracula Become The World's Most Famous Vampire?

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How did Dracula become the world's most famous vampire? - Stanley Stepanic

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Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849) was an American writer known for his depiction of macabre, supernatural scenes, which often featured death or a fear of death. He's often referred to as one of the creators of the American short story, and numerous other writers cite Poe as a key influence on their work.

Poe's Background and Early Life

Born in Boston in 1809, Poe suffered from depression and battled alcoholism later in life. Both of his parents died before he was 3 years old, and he was raised as a foster child by John Allan. Although Allan paid for Poe's education, the tobacco importer eventually cut off financial support, and Poe struggled to make a living with his writing. After the death of his wife Virginia in 1847, Poe's alcoholism grew worse. He died in Baltimore in 1849.

Not well-regarded in life, his work has posthumously come to be seen as genius. His most famous stories include "The Tell-Tale Heart," "Murders in the Rue Morgue," and "The Fall of the House of Usher." In addition to being among his most-read works of fiction, these stories are widely read and taught in American literature courses as classic examples of the short story form.

Poe is also well-known for his epic poems, including "Annabel Lee" and " The Lake." But his 1845 poem " The Raven," the somber story of a man mourning his lost love to an unsympathetic bird who only replies with the word "nevermore," is probably the work for which Poe is best known.

Analyzing "A Dream Within a Dream"

Poe published the poem "A Dream Within a Dream" in 1849 in a magazine called Flag of Our Union. Like many of his other poems, the narrator of "A Dream Within a Dream" is suffering an existential crisis.

"A Dream Within a Dream" was published near the end of Poe's life, at a time when his alcoholism was believed to be interfering with his day-to-day functioning. It's not a stretch to consider that perhaps Poe himself was struggling with determining fact from fiction and having difficulty comprehending reality, as the poem's narrator does.

Several interpretations of this poem bear out the idea that Poe was feeling his own mortality when he wrote it: The "sands" he references in the second stanza may refer to the sand in an hourglass, which runs down as time expires.

Take this kiss upon the brow!
And, in parting from you now,
Thus much let me avow
You are not wrong, who deem
That my days have been a dream;
Yet if hope has flown away
In a night, or in a day,
In a vision, or in none,
Is it therefore the less gone?
All that we see or seem
Is but a dream within a dream.
I stand amid the roar
Of a surf-tormented shore,
And I hold within my hand
Grains of the golden sand
How few! yet how they creep
Through my fingers to the deep,
While I weep - while I weep!
O God! can I not grasp
Them with a tighter clasp?
O God! can I not save
One from the pitiless wave?
Is all that we see or seem
But a dream within a dream?

Resources and Further Reading

Sova, Dawn B. Edgar Allan Poe A to Z: the Essential Reference to His Life and Work. Checkmark, 2001.

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Analysis of "A Dream Within a Dream" by Edgar Allan Poe

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Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849) was an American writer known for his depiction of macabre, supernatural scenes, which often featured death or a fear of death. He's often referred to as one of the creators of the American short story, and numerous other writers cite Poe as a key influence on their work.

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Ralph Waldo Emerson once wrote: "Talent alone cannot make the writer. There must be a man behind the book."

There was a man behind "The Cask of Amontillado," "The Fall of the House of Usher," " The Black Cat," and poems like "Annabel Lee," " A Dream Within a Dream," and " The Raven." That man-Edgar Allan Poe-was talented, but he was also eccentric and prone to alcoholism-having experienced more than his share of tragedies. But, what stands out even more prominently than the tragedy of Edgar Allan Poe's life is his philosophy of death.

Orphaned at the age of two, Edgar Allan Poe was taken in by John Allan. Although Poe's foster father educated him and provided for him, Allan eventually disinherited him. Poe was left penniless, earning a meager living by writing reviews, stories, literary criticism, and poetry. All of his writing and his editorial work was not enough to bring him and his family above the level of mere subsistence, and his drinking made it difficult for him to hold a job.

Inspiration for Horror

Arising from such a stark background, Poe has become a classical phenomenon, known for the gothic horror he created in "The Fall of the House of Usher" and other works. Who can forget "The Tell-Tale Heart" and "The Cask of Amontillado"? Every Halloween those stories come to haunt us. On the darkest night, when we sit around the campfire and tell horrible tales, Poe's stories of horror, grotesque death, and madness are told again.

Why did he write about such horrible events? About the calculated and murderous entombment of Fortunato, as he writes, "A succession of loud and shrill screams, bursting suddenly from the throat of the chained form, seemed to thrust me violently back. For a brief moment-I trembled." Was it disillusionment with life that drove him to these grotesque scenes? Or was it some acceptance that death was inevitable and horrible, that it sneaks up like a thief in the night, leaving madness and tragedy in its wake?

Or, is it something more to do with the last lines of "The Premature Burial"? "There are moments when, even to the sober eye of Reason, the world of our sad Humanity may assume the semblance of a Hell... Alas! The grim legion of sepulchral terrors cannot be regarded as altogether fanciful... they must sleep, or they will devour us-they must be suffered to slumber, or we perish."

Perhaps death offered some answer for Poe. Perhaps escape. Perhaps only more questions-about why he still lived, why his life was so hard, why his genius was so little recognized.

He died as he had lived: a tragic, pointless death. Found in the gutter, apparently the victim of an election gang who used alcoholics to vote for their candidate. Taken to a hospital, Poe died four days later and was buried in a Baltimore cemetery next to his wife.

If he was not well-loved in his time (or at least not as well-appreciated as he might have been), his tales at least have taken on a life of their own. He's recognized as the founder of the detective story (for works like "The Purloined Letter," the best of his detective stories). He has influenced culture and literature; and his figure is placed beside the literary greats in history for his poetry, literary criticism, stories, and other works.

His view of death may have been filled with darkness, foreboding, and disillusionment. But, his works have lasted beyond the horror to become classics.

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How Edgar Allan Poe Became a Master of Horror

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Ralph Waldo Emerson once wrote: "Talent alone cannot make the writer. There must be a man behind the book." There was a man behind "The Cask of Amontillado," "The Fall of the House of Usher," " The Black Cat," and poems like "Annabel Lee," " A Dream Within a Dream," and " The Raven."

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Although the movement began more than 130 years ago, readers today are still trying to define the highly complex genre known as American Romanticism. Understanding the meaning of the literary period is challenging. Romanticism in America consisted of several common themes that questioned earlier ideas of literature, art, and philosophy. This feature will discuss Edgar Allan Poe's "Ligeia" (1838) to demonstrate how one writer uses supernatural themes than the more traditional, classical themes of the 18th century.

Ligeia's Unusual Beauty

Not only does Ligeia's unusual beauty represent a reoccurring theme throughout the story, but the text portrays Poe's method of rejecting the "ordinary," a common theme in past literature, while still promoting the ideas of Romanticism. One example of this is how Poe repeatedly points out how flaws in the classical appearance of Rowena, "the fair-haired, the blue-eyed," by comparing her to Ligeia whose "features were not of that regular mould which we have been falsely taught to worship in the classical labors of the heathen." Poe explains through the narrator how more exalted and meaningful Ligeia's beauty is specifically because she exhibits more natural features instead of the classical features. Poe clearly rejects classical beauty by killing off Rowena and having Ligeia, the heroine and the personification of Romantic beauty, live on through Rowena's body.

The narrator describes his beautiful spouse almost like a ghost: "She came and departed as a shadow." He also thinks her beauty, more specifically her eyes, as a "strange mystery." Her eyes make her seem unreal or superhuman because of her large "expressive" eyes that the narrator cannot explain except that they are "far larger than the ordinary eyes of our own race." The rejection of the classical values and the welcoming of the supernatural through unusual, mysterious beauty indicates Poe's bias towards Romantic themes particularly since the narrator describes her eyes and voice further as "which at once so delighted and appalled me--by the almost magical melody, modulation, distinctness, and placidity of her low voice." In this statement, Ligeia almost frightens the narrator because of her "grotesque" and supernatural qualities. He cannot explain what he sees, but in Romanticism, many times the writers threw out the rational and replaced it with the irregular and unexplained.

When Did We Meet?

Another contradiction of the narrator's relationship with Ligeia is how he cannot explain how he knows her, or when and where they met. "I cannot, for my soul, remember how, when, or even precisely where, I first became acquainted with the lady Ligeia." Why is it that Ligeia has taken away his recollection? Consider how unusual this episode is since most people can remember the smallest details of meeting their true love. It seems that she almost has control over him. Then, her love for him demonstrates more Romantic themes of the supernatural since she returns from the dead through Rowena.

Often, Romanticist literature tried to disconnect itself with past literary styles by adding a theme of unusual remoteness concerning time and space. For example, Ligeia's identity has no clear beginning or end. This fact clearly demonstrates another example of this excessive, irregular, and unexplained style of writing commonly found in Romanticist literature. We never know how the narrator meets Ligeia, where she was after she dies, or how she is capable of resurrecting herself through another woman. All of this is in strict defiance of Restoration literature and a rejection of 18th-century writers' philosophies. By challenging what 18th-century writers labeled as appropriate themes, Poe writes "Ligeia" to promote his belief in Romanticist theories and ideas. His originality, specifically the use of the supernatural, is a consistent example of the innovation projected throughout Romantic literature.

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Romanticism and the Supernatural in Edgar Allan Poe's Ligeia

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Although the movement began more than 130 years ago, readers today are still trying to define the highly complex genre known as American Romanticism. Understanding the meaning of the literary period is challenging. Romanticism in America consisted of several common themes that questioned earlier ideas of literature, art, and philosophy.

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The Gothic architecture style found in churches, synagogues, and cathedrals built between approximately 1100 to 1450 CE, stirred the imagination of painters, poets, and religious thinkers in Europe and Great Britain.

From the remarkable great abbey of Saint-Denis in France to the Altneuschul ("Old-New") Synagogue in Prague, Gothic churches were designed to humble man and glorify God. Yet, with its innovative engineering, the Gothic style really was a testament to human ingenuity.

Gothic Beginnings: Medieval Churches and Synagogues

The earliest Gothic structure is often said to be the ambulatory of the abbey of Saint-Denis in France, constructed under the direction of Abbot Suger (1081-1151). The ambulatory became a continuation of the side aisles, providing open access to surround the main altar. How did Suger do it and why? This revolutionary design is fully explained in the Khan Academy video Birth of the Gothic: Abbot Suger and the ambulatory at St. Denis.

Built between 1140 and 1144, St. Denis became a model for most of the late 12th-century French cathedrals, including those at Chartres and Senlis. However, features of the Gothic style are found in earlier buildings in Normandy and elsewhere.

Gothic Engineering

"All of the great Gothic churches of France have certain things in common," wrote American architect and art historian Talbot Hamlin (1889-1956), "-a great love of height, of large windows, and an almost universal use of monumental west fronts with twin towers and great doors between and below them...The whole history of Gothic architecture in France is also characterized by a spirit of perfect structural clarity...to allow all of the structural members to be controlling elements in the actual visual impression."

Gothic architecture does not hide the beauty of its structural elements. Centuries later, American architect Frank Lloyd Wright (1867-1959) praised the "organic character" of Gothic buildings: their soaring artistry grows organically from the honesty of visual construction.

Gothic Synagogues

Jews were not permitted to design buildings in Medieval times. Jewish places of worship were designed by Christians who incorporated the same Gothic details used for churches and cathedrals.

The Old-New Synagogue in Prague was an early example of Gothic design in a Jewish building. Constructed in 1279, more than a century after the Gothic Saint-Denis in France, the modest building has a pointed arch façade, a steep roof, and walls fortified by simple buttresses. Two small dormer-like "eyelid" windows provide light and ventilation to the interior space-a vaulted ceiling and octagonal pillars.

Also known by the names Staronova and Altneuschul, the Old-New Synagogue has survived wars and other catastrophes to become the oldest synagogue in Europe still used as a place of worship.

By the 1400s, the Gothic style was so predominant that builders routinely used Gothic details for all types of structures. Secular buildings such as town halls, royal palaces, courthouses, hospitals, castles, bridges, and fortresses reflected Gothic ideas.

Builders Discover Pointed Arches

Gothic architecture is not merely about ornamentation. The Gothic style brought innovative new construction techniques that allowed churches and other buildings to reach great heights.

One important innovation was the experimental use of pointed arches, although the structural device was not new. Early pointed arches can be found in Syria and Mesopotamia, and Western builders probably stole the idea from Muslim structures, such as the 8th century Palace of Ukhaidir in Iraq. Earlier Romanesque churches had pointed arches, too, but builders didn't capitalize on the shape.

The Point of Pointed Arches

During the Gothic era, builders discovered that pointed arches would give structures amazing strength and stability. They experimented with varying steepness, and "experience had shown them that pointed arches thrust out less than circular arches," wrote Italian architect and engineer Mario Salvadori (1907-1997). "The main difference between Romanesque and Gothic arches lies in the pointed shape of the latter, which, besides introducing a new aesthetic dimension, has the important consequence of reducing the arch thrusts by as much as fifty percent."

In Gothic buildings, the weight of the roof was supported by the arches rather than the walls. This meant that walls could be thinner.

Ribbed Vaulting and Soaring Ceilings

Earlier Romanesque churches relied on barrel vaulting, where the ceiling between the barrel arches actually looked like the inside of a barrel or a covered bridge. Gothic builders introduced the dramatic technique of ribbed vaulting, created from a web of rib arches at various angles.

While barrel vaulting carried weight on continuous solid walls, ribbed vaulting used columns to support the weight. The ribs also delineated the vaults and gave a sense of unity to the structure.

Flying Buttresses and High Walls

In order to prevent the outward collapse of the arches, Gothic architects began using a revolutionary flying buttress system. So-called "flying buttresses" are freestanding brick or stone supports attached to the exterior walls by an arch or a half-arch, giving the buildings an impression of potential winged flight in addition to a vital source of support. One of the most popular examples is found on the Notre Dame de Paris Cathedral.

Stained Glass Windows Bring Color and Light

Because of the advanced use of pointed arches in construction, the walls of Medieval churches and synagogues throughout Europe were no longer used as primary supports-the walls could not alone hold up the building. This engineering advancement enabled artistic statements to be displayed in the wall areas of glass. The huge stained glass windows and a profusion of smaller windows throughout Gothic buildings created the effect of interior lightness and space and exterior color and grandeur.

Gothic Era Stained Glass Art and Craft

"What enabled the craftsmen to contrive the large stained glass windows of the later Middle Ages," pointed out Hamlin, "was the fact that iron frameworks, called armatures, could be built into the stone, and the stained glass fastened to them by wiring where necessary. In the best Gothic work, the design of these armatures had an important bearing on the stained-glass pattern, and its outline furnished the basic design for the stained-glass decoration. It is thus that the so-called medallion window was developed."

"Later," Hamlin continued, "the solid iron armature was sometimes replaced by saddle bars running straight across the window, and the change from the elaborate armature to saddle bar coincided with the change from rather set and small-scale designs to large, free compositions occupying the entire window area."

One of the Best Examples

The stained glass window shown here is from the 12th century Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris. Construction on Notre Dame lasted between 1163-1345 and spanned the Gothic era.

Gargoyles Guard and Protect the Cathedrals

Cathedrals in the High Gothic style became increasingly elaborate. Over several centuries, builders added towers, pinnacles, and hundreds of sculptures.

In addition to religious figures, many Gothic cathedrals are heavily ornamented with strange, leering creatures. These gargoyles are not merely decorative. Originally, the sculptures were waterspouts to remove rain from the roofs and extended away from the walls, protecting the foundation. Since most people in Medieval days could not read, the carvings also took on the important role of illustrating lessons from the scriptures.

In the late 1700s, architects took a disliking to gargoyles and other grotesque statues. Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris and many other Gothic buildings were stripped of devils, dragons, griffins, and other grotesqueries. The ornaments were restored to their perches during a careful restoration in the 1800s.

Floor Plans For Medieval Buildings

Gothic buildings were based on the traditional plan used by basilicas, like the Basilique Saint-Denis in France. However, as the French Gothic rose to great heights, English architects built grandeur in larger horizontal floor plans, rather than height.

Shown here is the floor plan for the 13th century Salisbury Cathedral and Cloisters in Wiltshire, England.

"Early English work has the quiet charm of an English spring day," wrote architecture scholar Hamlin. "It's most characteristic monument is Salisbury Cathedral, built at almost identically the same time as Amiens, and the difference between the English and the French Gothic can nowhere more dramatically be seen than in the contrast between the bold height and daring construction of the one and the length and delightful simplicity of the other."

Diagram of a Medieval Cathedral: Gothic Engineering

Medieval man considered himself an imperfect reflection of the divine light of God, and Gothic architecture was the ideal expression of this view.

New techniques of construction, such as pointed arches and flying buttresses, permitted buildings to soar to amazing new heights, dwarfing anyone who stepped inside. Moreover, the concept of divine light was suggested by the airy quality of Gothic interiors illuminated by walls of stained glass windows. The complicated simplicity of ribbed vaulting added another Gothic detail to the engineering and artistic mix. The overall effect is that Gothic structures are much lighter in structure and spirit than sacred places built in the earlier Romanesque style.

Medieval Architecture Reborn: Victorian Gothic Styles

Gothic architecture reigned for 400 years. It spread from northern France, swept throughout England and Western Europe, crept into Scandinavia and Central Europe, then south into the Iberian Peninsula, and even found its way into the Near East. However, the 14th century brought a devastating plague and extreme poverty. Building slowed, and by the end of the 1400s, Gothic-style architecture was replaced by other styles.

Scornful of exuberant, excessive ornamentation, artisans in Renaissance Italy compared medieval builders to German "Goth" barbarians from earlier times. Thus, after the style had faded from popularity, the term Gothic style was coined to refer to it.

But, Medieval building traditions never completely vanished. During the nineteenth century, builders in Europe, England, and the United States borrowed Gothic ideas to create an eclectic Victorian style: Gothic Revival. Even small private homes were given arched windows, lacy pinnacles, and an occasional leering gargoyle.

Lyndhurst in Tarrytown, New York is a grand 19th century Gothic Revival mansion designed by Victorian architect Alexander Jackson Davis.

Gutheim, Frederick (ed.). "Frank Lloyd Wright On Architecture: Selected Writings (1894-1940)." New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1941.

Hamlin, Talbot. "Architecture through the Ages." New York: Putnam and Sons, 1953.

Harris, Beth, and Steven Zucker. "Birth of the Gothic: Abbot Suger and the Ambulatory at St. Denis." Medieval World-Gothic. Khan Academy, 2012. Video / Transcript.

Salvadori, Mario. "Why Buildings Stand Up: The Strength of Architecture." New York: WW Norton and Company, 1980.

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Medieval Churches and Synagogues, Gothic Style

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The Gothic architecture style found in churches, synagogues, and cathedrals built between approximately 1100 to 1450 CE, stirred the imagination of painters, poets, and religious thinkers in Europe and Great Britain. From the remarkable great abbey of Saint-Denis in France to the Altneuschul ("Old-New") Synagogue in Prague, Gothic churches were designed to humble man and glorify God.

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Here’s an overview of Gothic literature with an explanation of the stylistic elements and some examples of different works.

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In the most general terms, ​ Gothic literature can be defined as writing that employs dark and picturesque scenery, startling and melodramatic narrative devices, and an overall atmosphere of exoticism, mystery, fear, and dread. Often, a Gothic novel or story will revolve around a large, ancient house that conceals a terrible secret or serves as the refuge of an especially frightening and threatening character.

Despite the fairly common use of this bleak motif, Gothic writers have also used supernatural elements, touches of romance, well-known historical characters, and travel and adventure narratives to entertain their readers. The type is a subgenre of Romantic literature -that's Romantic the period, not romance novels with breathless lovers with wind-swept hair on their paperback covers-and much fiction today stems from it.

Development of the Genre

Gothic literature developed during the Romantic period in Britain. The first mention of "Gothic," as pertaining to literature, was in the subtitle of Horace Walpole's 1765 story "The Castle of Otranto: A Gothic Story" which was supposed to have been meant by the author as a subtle joke-"When he used the word it meant something like 'barbarous,' as well as 'deriving from the Middle Ages." In the book, it's purported that the story was an ancient one, then recently discovered. But that's just part of the tale.

The supernatural elements in the story, though, launched a whole new genre, which took off in Europe. Then America's Edgar Allen Poe got ahold of it in the mid-1800s and succeeded like no one else. In Gothic literature, he found a place to explore psychological trauma, the evils of man, and mental illness. Any modern-day zombie story, detective story, or Stephen King novel owes a debt to Poe. There may have been successful Gothic writers before and after him, but no one perfected the genre quite like Poe.

Major Gothic Writers

A few of the most influential and popular 18th-century Gothic writers were Horace Walpole ( The Castle of Otranto, 1765), Ann Radcliffe ( Mysteries of Udolpho, 1794), Matthew Lewis ( The Monk, 1796), and Charles Brockden Brown ( Wieland, 1798).

The genre continued to command a large readership well into the 19th century, first as Romantic authors such as Sir Walter Scott ( The Tapestried Chamber, 1829) adopted Gothic conventions, then later as Victorian writers such as Robert Louis Stevenson ( The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, 1886) and Bram Stoker (, 1897) incorporated Gothic motifs in their stories of horror and suspense.

Elements of Gothic fiction are prevalent in several of the acknowledged classics of 19th-century literature, including Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1818), Nathaniel Hawthorne's The House of the Seven Gables (1851), Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre (1847), Victor Hugo's The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1831 in French), and many of the tales written by Edgar Allan Poe such as "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" (1841) and "The Tell-Tale Heart" (1843).

Influence on Today's Fiction

Today, Gothic literature has been replaced by ghost and horror stories, detective fiction, suspense and thriller novels, and other contemporary forms that emphasize mystery, shock, and sensation. While each of these types is (at least loosely) indebted to Gothic fiction, the Gothic genre was also appropriated and reworked by novelists and poets who, on the whole, cannot be strictly classified as Gothic writers.

In the novel Northanger Abbey, Jane Austen affectionately showcased the misconceptions and immaturities that could be produced by misreading Gothic literature. In experimental narratives such as The Sound and the Fury and Absalom, Absalom! William Faulkner transplanted Gothic preoccupations-threatening mansions, family secrets, doomed romance-to the American South. And in his multigenerational chronicle One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel García Márquez constructs a violent, dreamlike narrative around a family house that takes on a dark life of its own.

Similarities With Gothic Architecture

There are important, though not always consistent, connections between Gothic literature and Gothic architect. Gothic structures, with their abundant carvings, crevices, and shadows, can conjure an aura of mystery and darkness and often served as appropriate settings in Gothic literature for the mood conjured upthere. Gothic writers tended to cultivate those emotional effects in their works, and some of the authors even dabbled in architecture. Horace Walpole also designed a whimsical, castle-like Gothic residence called Strawberry Hill.

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Learn about Gothic literature, the genre of novels and short stories popular in the 18th to 19th century, with variations up to the current day.

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A 20th Century Gothic Story Expressing Fear, forbidden love, and the Evolution of Women Characters

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A 20th Century Gothic Story Expressing Fear, forbidden love, and the Evolution of Women Characters

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Terror and Wonder - The Gothic Imagination

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Terror and Wonder - The Gothic Imagination

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The British Library

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Terror and Wonder: The Gothic Imagination

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Rachelle Chaykin - Pennsylvania Institute of Technology

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Dr Jak Peake - Uni of Essex

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University of Essex | Representing the Gothic: Dr Jak Peake

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Features of the Gothic

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A Philosophical Inquiry into The Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful

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A Philosophical Inquiry into The Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful

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Edmund Burke

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Ann Radcliffe Re-explained

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Horror. Terror. They're synonyms, right? Actually, they're similar, but their meanings are slightly different, especially in the world of Gothic literature. In fact the terms represent two different schools of thought that early writers of Gothic literature divided themselves along. And at the beginning, this division occurred loosely along gender lines, as Matthew Lewis and Ann Radcliffe were held up as the representatives of each camp.

Ann Radcliffe, prolific writer of Gothic novels and matriarch of the Female Gothic movement, was the first to discuss at length the differences between horror and terror. In an essay titled " On the Supernatural in Poetry," Radcliffe describes horror as the cheaper, shock-value version of the emotion. Horror is the fear of something concrete, as experienced when one encounters a monster, a specter, or a scene of violence. Terror, on the other hand, is characterized by "uncertainty and obscurity." It is the sense of anxiety and dread that comes from the fear of the unknown or the yet-to-come. Radcliffe felt that terror, and not horror, was the path to the sublime-the ultimate goal shared by Romantic poets and many Gothic writers of achieving a higher emotional state in which fear and awe are intermingled. Radcliffe exemplified this ideal of terror in her own novels which often featured young heroines trapped in spooky castles and tortured by ominous sounds outside their doors and shadows just out of sight.

Radcliffe's denunciation of horror was in all likelihood a dig at her rival Matthew Gregory Lewis, best known as the author of the most shocking and gory of the early Gothic novels, The Monk. In Lewis's novel, the object of fear is not an ambiguous being of murmurs and shadows but rather a lustful monk who poses a very real danger to the characters in the story. Other dangers include bloodthirsty mobs and murderously sanctimonious nuns. The novel is full of scandalous scenes of violence, lewdness, and grotesquerie which have secured it a memorable place in the history of Gothic fiction.

While some followers and imitators of Lewis and Radcliffe continued to perpetuate the horror/terror divide, many writers use a balance of both emotions in their works of gothic fiction. Stephen King, one of the fathers of the modern horror genre, addressed the topic in his non-fiction book Danse Macabre, saying:

"I recognize terror as the finest emotion and so I will try to terrorize the reader. But if I find that I cannot terrify, I will try to horrify, and if I find that I cannot horrify, I'll go for the gross-out."

Interestingly, while the two have tended to blend together in literature, the divide between horror and terror seems to have become even starker in films. Many horror films these days can easily be divided into either slasher films-which horrify with their depictions of violence and gore-and psychological horror films-which build terror through suspense and implication.

Which do you prefer: horror or terror? Tell me why in the comments.

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Horror vs. Terror and the Gender Divide in Gothic Literature | The Gothic Library

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Horror. Terror. They're synonyms, right? Actually, they're similar, but their meanings are slightly different, especially in the world of Gothic literature. In fact the terms represent two different schools of thought that early writers of Gothic literature divided themselves along. And at the beginning, this division occurred loosely along gender lines, as Matthew Lewis and ...

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Critic: Hogle

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Ann Radcliffe

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Gothic Novels, Terror, and Ann Radcliffe’s The Italian 

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Gothic Novels, Terror, and Ann Radcliffe’s The Italian 

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Professor Nick Groom

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Oxford Academic (Oxford University Press)

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Gothic Novels, Terror, and Ann Radcliffe’s The Italian | Nick Groom

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An introduction to Ann Radcliffe

Ann Radcliffe is one of the founders of Gothic fiction. Dale Townshend explores Radcliffe's works in terms of the Female Gothic and her unique distinction between terror and horror.

The 'Shakspeare [sic] of Romance Writers; 'the mighty magician of THE MYSTERIES OF UDOLPHO'; 'the first poetess of romantic fiction'; 'a genius of no common stamp'; 'the great enchantress of that generation'; 'mother Radcliff [sic]': Nathan Drake, T J Mathias, Walter Scott, Anna Laetitia Barbauld, Thomas De Quincey and John Keats respectively, together with countless other essayists, reviewers and critics of the Romantic period in Britain, praised the writing of the Gothic romancer, poet and travel-writer Ann Ward Radcliffe (1764-1823) in the most superlative terms imaginable. Although Radcliffe wrote poetry, a travelogue and three other novels, her literary reputation, today, rests largely on the three Gothic romances that she published during the turbulent, post-French Revolutionary decade of 1790s: The Romance of the Forest, Interspersed with Some Pieces of Poetry in 1791; The Mysteries of Udolpho: A Romance; Interspersed with Some Pieces of Poetry in 1794; and The Italian: or, The Confessional of the Black Penitents in late 1796 or early 1797.

Letter from Ann Radcliffe to her mother-in-law

Examples of manuscripts in Ann Radcliffe's hand are rare. This undated letter was sent to Radcliffe's mother-in-law.

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Founder of a class or school

Even as critics and reviewers in the 1790s castigated Gothic fiction as the 'trash of the circulating libraries' - that is, as a cheap and tawdry form of popular entertainment that, in its formulaic and highly repetitive nature, fell foul of the emphasis that emergent Romantic aesthetics placed upon the category of 'original genius' - Radcliffe was consistently singled out an exception, as the one writer who was deservedly exempt from the general condemnation of Gothic writing in Romantic-period culture. Although Horace Walpole, while galvanising tendencies that had been present in British culture for at least two centuries before, had ostensibly 'invented' the Gothic literary mode in The Castle of Otranto in late 1764, it was to Radcliffe that most late 18th- and early 19th-century critics and literary historians looked as the perfector of the form, as the writer in whose works the Gothic mode in its most acceptable and pleasing of forms came most fully into being. As Walter Scott put it in 1824,

Mrs Radcliffe, as an author, has the most decided claim to take her place among the favoured few, who have been distinguished as the founders of a class, or school. She led the way in a peculiar style of composition, affecting powerfully the mind of the reader, which has since been attempted by many, but in which no one has attained or approached the excellencies of the original inventor ... .

As Scott's assessment suggests, it was particularly Radcliffe's deft manipulation of the experience of terror and wonder that, together with her superlative skills in the rendition of visual, almost pictorial natural landscapes, most pleased her early readers. Consequently, Radcliffe became the most highly paid professional writer of the 1790s: in an age in which the average amount earned by an author upon receipt of a manuscript was £10, her publishers, G G and J Robinson bought the copyright for The Mysteries of Udolpho for £500, while The Italian garnered from Cadell and Davies a staggering £800. She was also the most emulated, copied and plagiarised author of the period: visual tableaux taken directly from her highly descriptive prose-works provided the subject-matter for several Romantic painters; the plots of her lengthy novels were tirelessly reworked as short, often highly illustrated chapbooks with attention-grabbing titles such as The Southern Tower: or, Conjugal Sacrifice and Retribution (c. 1805) and The Midnight Assassin: Or, Confession of the Monk Rinaldi (c. 1802); and her suspense-filled fictions inspired several dramatic appropriations and retellings on London's Gothic stage, including James Boaden's Fontainville Forest (1794) and The Italian Monk (1797), Henry Siddons's The Sicilian Romance: Or, the Apparition of the Cliffs (1794), Miles Peter Andrews's The Mysteries of the Castle (1794) and George Manners's Edgar: Or, Caledonian Feuds (1806).

The Midnight Assassin, a pirated edition of The Italian by Ann Radcliffe

Frontispiece illustration from The Midnight Assassin, one of many examples of a pirated Ann Radcliffe novel.

Though the work of Radcliffe fell into relative obscurity from the mid-Victorian period onwards, she was resurrected as somewhat of a literary-historical 'curiosity' with the rise of Gothic scholarship in the early decades of the 20th century. Indeed, it was really only with the reawakened interest in the Gothic aesthetic initiated by the publication of David Punter's The Literature of Terror in 1980 that Radcliffe and those of her school came to be regarded as a serious and legitimate object of academic enquiry. This was a moment that coincided with the interrogation of the masculine biases underpinning canonical conceptualisations of 'Romanticism' - William Blake; William Wordsworth; Samuel Taylor Coleridge; Percy Bysshe Shelley; John Keats; Lord Byron - that was spearheaded by Anglo-American feminist literary critics in the 1970s and 1980s. In seeking to interrogate further the cultural and academic privileging of 'High' Romantic poetry over the 'popular' horrors and terrors of the Gothic romance, more recent critical work on Radcliffe has sought to argue for the writer's central place within literary culture of the late 18th and early 19th centuries, noting her influence on, and points of aesthetic similarity with, such seminal Romantic writers as Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Walter Scott and Jane Austen.

Current scholarship within the fields of Gothic and Romantic studies tends to conceptualise and respond to the work of Radcliffe according to the following two concerns: the distinctions horror and terror, and the so-called 'Female Gothic'.

Burke's A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful

Edmund Burke's definitions of beauty, terror and the sublime was central to the development of Ann Radcliffe's Gothic novels.

Horror and terror

Based upon the influential distinction between horror and terror that the writer drew in her posthumously published essay 'On the Supernatural in Poetry' (1826) - 'terror and horror are so far opposite', her speaker declares, 'that the first expands the soul, and awakens the faculties to a high degree of life; the other contracts, freezes, and nearly annihilates them' - Radcliffe herself has come to epitomise the writing of 'terror' in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, despite the fact that her fiction seems to use the two terms interchangeably. For, unlike the modes of 'horror' demonstrated by the ghastly, lurid excesses of a fiction such as Matthew Lewis's The Monk: A Romance (1796), Radcliffean narratives, taking their cue from Edmund Burke's A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757), are characterised by an emphasis upon psychological suspense over bodily gore, by an omnipresent sense of mystery and obscurity over the certainties of fast-paced action, and by mere hints and suggestions of ghostly activity over fully realised manifestations of the supernatural. In a fiction such as The Mysteries of Udolpho, for instance, Radcliffe, though not for the first time in her career, famously gives expression to her distinctive narrative technique of the 'explained supernatural', according to which several plot-based occurrences that momentarily seem, for both reader and heroine alike, to be of preternatural, other-worldly causes are eventually revealed to have rational, material origins. In Lewis's The Monk, by contrast, supernatural beings and events, including the figure of the Bleeding Nun and even the eventual appearance of the Devil, are left very much in place at the narrative's end. Concretising these and other differences between sensation and sensibility, horror and terror, Radcliffe would pen what was, in part, her own response to the extravagances of Lewis's text in The Italian, the last novel that she published during her lifetime. Although Radcliffe's use of the 'explained supernatural' was almost uniformly met with disapproval by several early critics - many contemporary readers, including Scott, felt disappointed, gulled and altogether cheated by Radcliffe's tendency to dispense with spectral, ghostly terrors through the process of rational explanation - it nonetheless proved to be extremely influential among Gothic writers of the day, not least of all in Austen's playful Gothic parody, Northanger Abbey (1818). Ever sensitive to reviews of her work, Radcliffe abandoned the technique of the explained supernatural in favour of a 'real' ghost in her final novel, the posthumously published Gaston de Blondeville (1826).

The Monk by Matthew Lewis

This frontispiece illustration and title page summary from an 1818 edition of The Monk by Matthew Lewis (first published 1796) provides a flavour of how extreme and dramatic the novel was.

Male and Female Gothic

With the rise of Anglo-American feminist criticism in the 1970s, these distinctions between terror and horror, the explained supernatural and the unexplained supernatural, and Radcliffe and Lewis would be critically superimposed upon the differences between 'female' and 'male' Gothic respectively. Ellen Moers's influential coining of the category of the 'Female Gothic' in her landmark study Literary Women in 1976 served to place the fictions of Radcliffe, alongside Mary Shelley's Frankenstein: or, The Modern Prometheus (1818; 1831), at the centre of this important, retrospectively named and constructed sense of literary tradition. When conceptualised according to this category, Radcliffe's fictions, particularly A Sicilian Romance, The Romance of the Forest and The Mysteries of Udolpho, are said to epitomise the ways in which women writers, from the 18th century onwards, have made recourse to the techniques and conventions of the Gothic mode in order to explore and articulate, often to highly politicised ends, the conditions and experiences of women within patriarchy. Orphaned early on in the narrative, and subject from this moment onwards to numerous forms of objectification, abuse and physical violence in a crumbling and purportedly haunted Gothic pile, the young heroines of Radcliffe's fictions give powerful articulation through the conventions of the Gothic to what Mary Wollstonecraft would figure in the subtitle to her own uncompleted Gothic fiction, Maria, as 'The Wrongs of Woman' (1798). In this way of thinking, the Gothic castle, abbey or recess - those Wollstonecraftian 'Abodes of horror' that, from The Castle of Otranto, onwards, have featured strongly in the Gothic imagination - becomes a powerful metaphor for women's 'incarceration', both domestic and otherwise, within the institutions of patriarchy, and the aggression that the vulnerable heroine suffers at the hands of a range of malevolent male villains a codified protest on the female writer's behalf against the sufferings of women engendered by marriage, maternity and even the fact of female embodiment itself. Perceived as a kind of 'mother' to this mode, then, Radcliffe stands at the origin of a feminist literary consciousness that not only influenced radical feminist writers such as Wollstonecraft in the 1790s, but also the fictions of writers such as Mary Shelley, Charlotte and Emily Brontë and Charlotte Perkins Gilman during the 19th century, the work of Shirley Jackson and Daphne du Maurier in the 20th century, as well the fictions of modern and contemporary North American and British writers such as Angela Carter, Ann-Marie Macdonald and Sarah Waters.

The Mysteries of Udolpho

The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) by Ann Radcliffe was one of the most popular and influential Gothic novels of the late 18th century.

Illustrations to Wuthering Heights by Clare Leighton

Illustration by Clare Leighton of Heathcliff from Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights. Like Radcliffe's novels, Wuthering Heights has been viewed as belonging to the Female Gothic.

Perceptions of Ann Radcliffe today

Mistress of the Gothic mode, a crucial voice in early feminist consciousness and a writer of Gothic terror par excellence: Radcliffe and her works deservedly occupy a central place within scholarly understandings of late 18th- and early 19th-century Gothic and Romantic writing. To this day, her oeuvre continues to inspire and engage both literary critics and readers alike. Of the considerable attention that Radcliffe is currently receiving from academic critics across the world, there are a number of topics that seem particularly rich for further investigation: the politics of this notoriously elusive writer (within the furore of British politics of the 1790s, was she the conservative that several critics took her to be, or did her fictions mask a more subversive political intent?); the ecological imperative behind her writings (to what extent was Radcliffe part of a broader Romantic preoccupation with the preservation of the natural environment?); the cultural meanings informing her carefully studied use of Gothic architecture; the translation and reception of Radcliffe's fictions in Europe, particularly Spain, Italy and France; her engagement with contemporary scientific thought; and her relationship with the travel writing and poetry of more canonical forms of British Romanticism. Regardless of the directions in which these and other scholarly interests might develop in future years, one fact remains indisputable: the writings of Radcliffe have terrified, delighted and enchanted her readers for over 200 years.

Dale Townshend is Professor Gothic Literature in the Centre for Gothic Studies at Manchester Metropolitan University. The recipient of an AHRC Leadership Fellowship entitled 'Writing Britain's Ruins, 1700-1850: The Architectural Imagination', he has recently completed a monograph and a co-edited collection of essays on the relationship between architecture and literature in the long 18th century.

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An introduction to Ann Radcliffe | The British Library

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Ann Radcliffe is one of the founders of Gothic fiction. Dale Townshend explores Radcliffe's works in terms of the Female Gothic and her unique distinction between terror and horror, and questions how readers have perceived these novels.

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Pauline Palmer

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The Gothic World offers an overview of this popular field whilst also extending critical debate in exciting new directions such as film, politics, fashion, architecture, fine art and cyberculture. Structured around the principles of time, space and practice, and including a detailed general introduction, the five sections look at: Gothic Histories Gothic Spaces Gothic Readers and Writers Gothic Spectacle Contemporary Impulses.

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Smith and Wallace

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Claire Kahane

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The Significance of Female Identity within Gothic Literature

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The Significance of Female Identity within Gothic Literature

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Rachel Clamp

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Critical Resources for the Study of Gothic Literature
[updated August 7, 2015]
I. Critical Resources for a Study of Gothic Literature

The Sickly Taper: continuing, on-line edition of the massive Gothic bibliography developed by the late Frederick S. Frank. Current up until 2011. Click on the "Bibliographies" tab to begin a search for an individual author.

Gothic Writers: A Critical and Bibliographical Guide. Ed. Jack Voller, Frederick S. Frank, and Douglass H. Thomson. Westport, CT.: Greenwood Press, 2001. Contains for each author covered a primary bibliography, an annotated secondary bibliography, and a critical essay.

"Annotated Bibliography" of The Gothic: Materials for Study (UVa)

Sublime Anxiety: The Gothic Family and the Outsider. A wonderful e-version of the UVa Library exhibition that draws from the Sadlier-Black collection, the primary repository of "first Gothics." Organized by interesting critical themes.

"What is the Gothic?" Diane Hoeveler's helpful reflections on this daunting question (scroll down past the course syllabus to find the section "What is the Gothic?")

The International Gothic Association

A Glossary of Literary Gothic Terms

: a gathering of Gothic chapbooks and critical materials for their re-evaluation. Includes an extensive The Gothic Archive Glossary of Gothic terms

The Gothic Imagination at the University of Stirling: this wonderfully imaginative and wide-reaching site "provides an interdisciplinary forum for lively discussion and critical debate concerning all manifestations of the Gothic mode"

II. Theorizing the Gothic (some of the following texts come from The Gothic: Materials for Study, a very useful introduction to and overview of Gothic literature, prepared by graduate students in a course taught by Jerome McGann and Patricia Meyer Spacks of the University of Virginia.)

A. Contemporary 18th and early 19th century accounts

selections from Edmund Burke's A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1759)

The Aikins' "On the Pleasure Derived from Objects of Terror" (1773)

from Ann Radcliffe's "On the Supernatural in Poetry." The New Monthly Magazine (1826): 145-52.

from Marquis de Sade's "Idee sur les Romans," preface to Les Crimes de L'amour (1800).

from William Wordsworth's "Preface" to Lyrical Ballads (1800).

Romantics Readings of Gothic literature

[ Supernatural Horror in Literature by H.P. Lovecraft (1935). Some insightful reflections on the early Gothics by the 20th century master of "Weird Fiction."]

B. Political Contextualizing of the Gothic. A very contested site: many critics see in gothic terror a reflection and playing out of bourgeois anxiety about the real Terror abroad and the "time of troubles" (see Sade and Wordsworth entries above--also the seminal work of Maurice Levy); others see in the conservative pull of gothic plotting a supreme defense of bourgeois values against forces of repression, superstition, and irrationality. See Howard's and Thomson's reviews (below) of two recent books on the Gothic for some reflections on this debate.
1. Ronald Paulson, "Gothic Fiction and the French Revolution"
2. Stephen Bernstein, "Form and Ideology in the Gothic Novel"
3. Howard, Jacqueline. "Robert Mighall, A Geography of Victorian Gothic Fiction: Mapping History's Nightmares." Romanticism On the Net 20
4. Thomson, Douglass H. "A Companion to the Gothic. Ed. David Punter." Romanticism On the Net 20 (November 2000)

C. The Psychology of the Gothic

1. from Freud's "The Uncanny" (1919)
2. from Todorov's The Fantastic (1975)

D. The Female Gothic

1. The Female Gothic (UVa)
2. Diane Hoeveler's reflections on the female Gothic
3. Women Romantic-Era Writers by Adriana Craciun of UCal Riverside

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Critical Resources - Resources for the Study of Gothic Literature

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Critical Resources for the Study of Gothic Literature [updated August 7, 2015] I. Critical Resources for a Study of Gothic Literature The Sickly Taper : continuing, on-line edition of the massive Gothic bibliography developed by the late Frederick S. Frank. Current up until 2011.

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English Literary Representations of Otherness: Moral Absolutes; Class; Gender; Race

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English Literary Representations of Otherness: Moral Absolutes; Class; Gender; Race

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English Literary Representations of Otherness: Moral Absolutes; Class; Gender; Race

Scholars who work with structuralist, post-structuralist, feminist, marxist, and other methodologies which depend on "binary oppositions" often look for works in which characters are created by invoking some rhetoric of "otherness." The proper characters can be distinguished by their difference from the improper characters who are represented as somehow "Other" than the norm, the standards attributed by the author to the work's implied audience. Sometimes the work signals the distinguishing values by addressing the implied audience as "you" or "we," but at other times the work must be closely read for evidence implying its dependence on these values.
Moral Absolutes:
Paper writers (and exam preparers) could look for works which contained characters drawn using such strong binary oppositions, and try to explain how the plot associates various material and intangible attributes with the values at stake. To pick an obvious example, why are the vice characters in Everyman all male, and why are the virtue characters (except Priesthood, whom we never see) female? What kinds of ordinary social behaviors get swept up in to the play's definition of immoral acts we should consider impossibly "Other" and alien to ourselves? This will have interesting consequences for the construction of society if the play were to succeed, but since it apparently did not totally convince every member of its audience (or England would be a different place today!), they apparently viewed it as "resisting readers," to borrow Judith Fetterly's term for female readers of works which imply they are written for male audiences ( The Resisting Reader: A Feminist Approach to American Fiction [Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1978] 813.9 F421r in the JRL). This enables the paper writer to push beyond the obvious (what values does the author praise and blame?) to the less obvious or even the obscure but powerful (what does gender mean to Everyman's author?; how does he [we can assume for the sake of argument] paint a picture of his society's ordinary behaviors and what does he leave out? [any kiddies in the picture, any old-fashioned human love, for instance?).

Other texts which present readers with strongly delineated moral absolutes are "The Battle of Maldon," Julian of Norwich's "Showings" and Margery Kempe's book, Sidney's sonnets and other lyrics rejecting love, Marlowe's Faustus, Shakespeare's Lear, Jonson's Volpone, Herbert's and Crashaw's lyrics, and Milton's Paradise Lost. The trick in this kind of analysis is to carefully sieve the work for scenes and dialogue in which the opposed values of good and evil are described or named, and to look carefully at their immediate surroundings for the things these values are being associated with. The universe contains some true binary oppositions, like the difference between a light source and a light receiver, or the difference between black (absence of all color) and white (presence of all color). But it is hard to find true binaries that will not produce ambiguous states (e.g., "grey") or states that don't fit into either pole of the binary. In the case of moral reasoning, lots of "grey" usually can be found nearby, and sometimes you can luck out and find something that destroys the binary or shows it to be a false opposition. To do this kind of analysis (sometimes called "deconstruction") it helps to know a little history of critical theory, but even novice students can discover ways in which the Viking "feondes" behave better than the Godric who fled, for instance.
Class:
Medievalists rarely use the term "class" because it's a term of art which usually is defined as a self-aware sub-set of a society which identifies itself as having common interests and enemies on grounds of employment and/or wealth. It's a slippery notion, but it's easy enough to see class consciousness when it arises because it forms alliances and oppositions among characters because they expect those who do what they do or have the financial resources they have to act in concert with them against those who have more and do less (working-class vs. middle- and upper-class), or against those who have less and do more (middle-class vs. upper-class or working-class). The earlier word for medieval conceptions of social division was "estate," and there were three of them: the nobles, the clergy, and the yeomanry. They stood in an interlocking pyramid above and upon the large group of unfree peasants, tied to the land and hereditary service to its lord, which were known as the "villains" (people of the "vil" or social unit). The old formula had it that all three estates served each other: the clergy prayed for all, and their service of God was rewarded by military protection from the nobles and food from the free men and women; the nobles fought to protect all and to serve the king, and their service was rewarded by the clergy's prayers and by food from the free men and women; the free men and women raised the food and fed the clergy and nobles, and their service was rewarded by religious service and military protection. The unfree rarely were mentioned until after the Bubonic Plague (epidemic in 1349-1666 in England) depopulated the labor force and enabled them to begin to bargain with the lords and clergy for their labor's worth. Since the plague came to England when Chaucer was probably about nine years old, he grew up watching the strange separation of people into craft guilds (ancestors of the labor union), formerly unfree villains who had bought their freedom with excess earnings, yeomen who rose to become gentry or even nobles based on their income from trade or professions like medicine or law. This destabilization of English social structure was unprecedented and produced countless clashes over ancestry, occupation, wealth, duty, deference (i.e., giving way to one of higher perceived status), and preference. Do we find evidence of this in his work? Oh yes!

Paper writers (and exam preparers) could look at a strong estate-based social unit in the relationships described in "Wanderer" and "Maldon" for comparison with later medieval disruptions, or they could look at the later medieval estates under pressure and compare them with an intriguing incident of class-awareness in the Early Modern (1500-1660) or Modern (post-1660) periods. Some texts containing signs of estate-consciousness under pressure are: Chaucer's General Prologue pilgrim portraits, the Miller's Prologue and Tale, Margery Kempe's negotiations with her husband, Edmund Spenser's "Epithalamion" and Amoretti, Shakespeare's Lear (especially the quarrel between Kent and Oswald), Milton's construction of the fallen angels' hatred of Adam and Eve and of Satan's pitch to Eve re: God's power, the rhetoric of Lucy Hutchinson's memoir of her husband's "gunpowder debate" with his noble cousin, and the behavior of the servants vs. the behavior of the City Men and Women in Congreve.
Gender:
Maleness and femaleness become constructed in ways we may find unfamiliar when we read early literature. Biblical and rabbinical definitions of gender roles obviously tend to dominate the earliest literature's representation of what men and women ought to do (and hence of what constitutes a violation of those roles). However, several factors destabilized those roles in England in the Medieval period, and not a few of them had to do with the changes brought on by class-based social destabilization. Gender propriety tends to merge into estate propriety, as readers of Geoffrey de la Tour Landry and Andreas Capellanus can attest. (Both wrote conduct books, the former for his aristocratic daughters and the latter for a young courtier who wanted to know how the game of love was played.) Gendered misbehaviors resulted in estate confusion ("you're acting like a bourgois woman, not a noble" or "you're acting like a villain not a free-woman"). Attributes of life that tended to be strong gender markers were occupation, dress (including hairstyle), open-ness of speech, etc. Some of the same texts above that are coded with emergent class anxieties also reflect instability in gender definitions, most famously the pilgrim Pardoner ("I trow he were a gelding or a mare"). Many less obvious events and passages of dialogue can be read as indicating the author's attempt to represent gender codes, either as stable or unstable systems, from Absolon's assault upon Hende Nicholas in the Miller's Tale to the gender-bending world ofLear's daughters. Once literate women begin publicly questioning the roles assigned them, and even marriage as an institution, the debate really kicks into high gear, and one might say that it still has not ceased, even Post-Modern America. In addition to the Wife of Bath's Tale and Prologue, and Margery Kempe's debate with the Archbishop, some sleeper texts you might not think to pick to analyze representation of gender might be Everyman (see "Moral Absolutes" above),Halkett's memoir about the jailbreak of the future James II, and Aphra Behn's Oroonoko.
Race:
To medieval readers and writers, all human beings tended to be thought of as the descendents of Adam and Eve via Noah, and the more thoughtful of them would have found modern notions of "race" a profound mystery. However, religious differences sometimes were expressed in racial terms, especially in the context of the Crusades' invasions of the Middle East in the name of purifying the sanctuaries of Christendom after their contamination under the rule of the pagans they thought of (erroneously, of course) as worshipers of an idol medieval Christian writers called "Mohamet" or (more cruelly and crudely) "Mahound." Knowing early nothing about Islam, despite extensive military and cultural contact over the centuries, medieval writers tended to describe Islamic armies as populated by giants, grotesque, sometimes dark-skinned beings who, oddly enough, tended to be cut to ribbons by the swords of ordinary-proportioned Christian heroes. Various fiends, often associated with blackness, were presumed to haunt the pagans' religious observations. However, in readings assigned for English 211, we will not encounter blackness as a racial signifier until we meet Prince Oroonoko, in whom Aphra Behn encodes the English encounter with the African "Other" explicitly in terms of his skin color and facial features. That text contains the most fruitful passages for paper writers and exam preparers who are trying to understand how the literature's later codification of blackness and whiteness emerged in English colonial and American literary texts. The famous usages of "black" in Shakespeare's sonnets and Donne's songs uniformly refers to persons with brunette hair, though even that coding of blackness is disadvantaged against "fair" or blonde hair (usually thought to be an estate-based binary separating the blonde Angles and Saxons, and later the conquering Norman lords and ladies, from dark-haired the Celts of Ireland, Scotland, and Wales). Blackness begins to make its appearance as racial/moral signifier in Milton, but you can see earlier appearance of it in Jonson's Volpone (I.5:43-49) where it is associated with Jonson's appeal to the English tendency to racialize the differences between themselves and the Italians (see also Ascham on "the Italianate Englishman" 567-69, but compare Sir Philip Sidney's generous praise of the Emperor's equestrian instructor, John Pietro Pugliano 934).

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English Literary Representations of Otherness

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
English Literary Representations of Otherness: Moral Absolutes; Class; Gender; Race Scholars who work with structuralist, post-structuralist, feminist, marxist, and other methodologies which depend on "binary oppositions" often look for works in which characters are created by invoking some rhetoric of "otherness."

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I have taught at MCC since 1997, both online and face-to-face. I have also worked as a tutor in the Writing Center. Classes I have taught range from composition (101 and 102) to creative writing and screenwriting to linguistics and technical writing to literature and ENH (English humanities). I hold a PhD in literature from Arizona State University. I am married with two children, a dog, and a cat. And I'm a big music fan.

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# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
I have taught at MCC since 1997, both online and face-to-face. I have also worked as a tutor in the Writing Center. Classes I have taught range from composition (101 and 102) to creative writing and screenwriting to linguistics and technical writing to literature and ENH (English humanities).

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I have taught at MCC since 1997, both online and face-to-face. I have also worked as a tutor in the Writing Center. Classes I have taught range from composition (101 and 102) to creative writing and screenwriting to linguistics and technical writing to literature and ENH (English humanities). I hold a PhD in literature from Arizona State University. I am married with two children, a dog, and a cat. And I'm a big music fan.

What kind of teacher am I? I like to provide students with detailed information at the start of any class so that they can decide if it is the best class for them. If they do, I expect them to do their best and to abide by the class policies, attend regularly, and complete work on time. In return, I am happy to answer questions, offer advice, and provide guidance in the effort to master the concepts and to demonstrate them effectively. Students with a positive attitude, strong work ethic, ability to follow instructions closely, good self-discipline, and active desire to learn and improve usually do well. But you get out what you put in.

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Summer 2021

ENG102

First-Year Composition

3 Credits

Emphasis on rhetoric and composition with a focus on persuasive, research-based writing and understanding writing as a process. Developing advanced college-level writing strategies through three or more writing projects comprising at least 4,000 words in total.
Prerequisites: Grade of C or better in ENG101.

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Fall 2021

CRW150

Introduction to Creative Writing

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Introduction to the basic aesthetics and techniques in contemporary creative writing within a variety of genres. Introduction to the analytical concepts and terminology necessary to understand, interpret, and enact contemporary creative writing. Facilitation of writing practices and evaluation. Introduction to literature's role in society. Prerequisites: None.

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ENG102

First-Year Composition

3 Credits

Emphasis on rhetoric and composition with a focus on persuasive, research-based writing and understanding writing as a process. Developing advanced college-level writing strategies through three or more writing projects comprising at least 4,000 words in total.
Prerequisites: Grade of C or better in ENG101.
Due to the possibility of last-minute schedule changes, students are encouraged to attend the first class meeting before purchasing the textbook.

General Education Designations: First-Year Composition [FYC]

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Notes: This is an Online class that does not meet at specific class times. Students are required to have access to a computer or mobile device, and Internet access, unless otherwise specified. Before enrolling in their first online class at MCC, students need to view the online orientation and complete the readiness survey on https://www.mesacc.edu/online/get-started for additional information.

Class 22234 Students may contact instructor at: jeremy.venema@mesacc.edu

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ENH110

Introduction to Literature

3 Credits

Introduction to international literature through various forms of literary expression; e.g., poetry, drama, essay, biography, autobiography, short story, and novel. Provides a global overview of literature with special emphasis on diverse cultural contributions of women, African Americans, Asian Americans, Hispanic Americans, and Native Americans. Prerequisites: None.

General Education Designations: Cultural Diversity in the US [C], Humanities, Fine Arts & Design [HU]

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Class 22262 Students may contact instructor at: jeremy.venema@mesacc.edu

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ENH214

Poetry Study

3 Credits

Involves reading, discussing, and analyzing poetry of various forms and from selected periods. Prerequisites: None.

General Education Designations: Humanities, Fine Arts & Design [HU]

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Class 22246 Students may contact instructor at: jeremy.venema@mesacc.edu

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ENH254

Literature and Film

3 Credits

Presents works of literature and their film versions and analyzes distinguishing techniques of each medium.
Prerequisites: A grade of C or better in ENG101, or ENG107, or equivalent.

General Education Designations: Humanities, Fine Arts & Design [HU], Literacy & Critical Inquiry [L]

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Class 24649 Students may contact instructor at: jeremy.venema@mesacc.edu

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I have taught at MCC since 1997, both online and face-to-face. I have also worked as a tutor in the Writing Center. Classes I have taught range from composition (101 and 102) to creative writing and screenwriting to linguistics and technical writing to literature and ENH (English humanities).

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Frankenstein and the Language of Monstrosity

Fred Botting

Chapter 1 of Making Monstrous: Frankenstein, Criticism, Theory (Manchester: Manchester Univ. Press, 1991)
{51} Monsters appear in literary andpolitical writings to signal both a terrible threat to established orders and a call to arms that demands the unification and protection of authorised values. Symptoms of anxiety and instability, monsters frequently emerge in revolutionary periods as dark and ominous doubles restlessly announcing an explosion of apocalyptic energy. Christopher Hill, for example, describes the fear evoked by the masses represented as a 'many-headed monster' in the decades leading up to the English Revolution.
On one level, the monsters of the French Revolution are no exception, since they signify the uncontrollable violence of the mob, Edmund Burke's 'swinish multitude', that tramples over civilised society. But there are other forms of monstrosity that also appear in the conflicts produced by revolution in France: among the waves of riotous noise individual and monstrous voices make themselves heard. Incarnated in identifiable shapes, monsters begin to be defined by the dangerous words they speak, words that question and resist, like the speech of Frankenstein's creation, the terms of the system into which they are born. Such resistance, indeed, partially accounts for the identity of 'monster' that is given them.

The figure of speech that classifies the mob and monstrous speaking figures as other to established political orders becomes entangled in the reverberations that transform one revolution into many. Wordsworth, in his Preface to the Lyrical Ballads, for instance, hints at the interimplication of literary and political issues as he avoids retracing the 'revolutions not of literature alone but likewise of society itself' (120). Revolutions extend their disturbing momentum to raise questions of language and power. Frankenstein, too, is traversed by the images and effects of the French Revolution. Concerned with the creation of monsters, the novel is a monster itself: the phrase 'hideous progeny', from the 1831 Introduction, refers to the monster and the book ( 10). Indeed, as Peter Brooks {52} argues in his discussion of language and monstrosity in Frankenstein, the subversive effects of textuality leave everything touched by the 'taint of monsterism' (604). It is also a 'taint' from which the criticism of the novel cannot remain immune.

Almost every aspect of the French Revolution discloses monstrosities, according to the writings of Edmund Burke. In a letter to his son, on 10 October 1789, Burke describes France as 'a world of Monsters' where Mirabeau 'presides as the Grand Anarch' (14). In the Reflections on the Revolution in France the 'monstrous tragi-comic scene' that exists in France engenders many monsters: mob and National Assembly are equated in terms of their destructive power, while the new Republic is built upon 'a monster of a constitution' (92, 279-80, 313).

Burke's Reflections, however, attack targets other than France. They cast their rather partial light on events in England and attempt to expose the delusions of the pro-French speeches of radicals, like Dr Richard Price, who sympathise with Republican France. By association, radicals, too, are made monstrous. Desiring to affirm English 'good order' -- 'the foundation of all good things' -- in the face of the 'inverted order in all things' that exists in France, 'we' are differentiated from and privileged over 'them' -- be they French revolutionaries or English radicals (372, 161). Beyond the pale of 'good order' or traditional authority, monsters can legitimately be attacked so that the 'equipoise', to use Burke's final metaphor, of England's ship of state can be preserved.

The 'good order' of English society that Burke appeals to may not, however, be as self-evident as is assumed, for the desire to affirm it declares that such order is lacking, already threatened, already rendered unstable, already requiring the 'small weight' of Burke's argument to reestablish its balance (377). Furthermore, the many monsters that are identified by Burke inhibit rather than aid the construction of a single unified position opposed to an overwhelming and monstrous threat. Nor do Burke's opinions restore balance, or silence the emerging voices of resistance: the monsters constructed by Burke's text multiply in the many replies that it provoked.

The famous responses by Thomas Paine and Mary Wollstonecraft disclose yet more monsters. In The Rights of Man the aristocracy is described as a monster, while Burke's method is considered to be of a 'marvellous and monstrous kind' (229, 201). Burke, a maker of monsters, is reconstructed as a monster himself. Similarly, Wollstonecraft's attack on Burke questions the conditions which produce {53} monsters: 'man', she argues, 'has been changed into an artificial monster by the station in which he is born' ( 73). Unjust modes of social organisation display their own monstrosity by their manufacturing of monsters: for William Godwin, government by courts and ministers forms a 'monstrous edifice' ( 439).

Radical replies thus challenge the terms of conservative arguments to interrogate the grounds and reverse the designations of monstrosity. Others return to inaugurate revolutions in meaning by reconstructing monster-makers as monsters. This revolving dialectic, however, is not easily arrested with the secure imposition of a single source or authoritative meaning for 'monster'. Radicals continue to be seen as monsters. Their writings, also, are considered monstrous, and suffer the repressive force of the law. Nonetheless, these writings still disseminated to continue the momentum of monstrosity. Indeed, writing betrays a certain monstrosity. The 'monstrous fiction' of revolution must, Burke insists, be exposed for the 'cant', 'fraud', 'gibberish' and 'hypocrisy' that it really is (124). Stabilising the 'revolution in sentiments, manners, and moral opinions' that is threatened by dangerous 'literary caballers', demands, however, the creation of Burke's own 'monstrous fiction' (175, 93). As Jon Klancher states:

Authorized by history, Burke's book turns the Revolution into a text so that he may outstrip it as a text, over-writing the revolutionaries' work in a superior act of authorship. (105)
Language becomes the site of struggle on, in and for which contests for authority are performed. These contests rage on, unable to arrest the monstrous overflow of meanings and establish an overriding and authoritative position above or outside of the field of combat. In these struggles language is itself glimpsed as a monster that resists and subverts the limits which any one position tries to impose.
Frankenstein is also affected by the metaphoric movements of monstrosity: recalling many features of the French Revolution, the text, like the monster, solicits and resists attempts to determine a single line of significance. Ronald Paulson and Lee Sterrenburg, both examining the relationship between the novel and the effects of the French Revolution on political debates in Britain, tend to ignore the various revolutions that traverse Frankenstein and thus replay the desires for authority that are represented in and resisted by the text-monster. Identifying the novel's fixed, singular and final meaning by {54} way of historical and biographical archives, the readings return to the unifying figure of the author as they attempt to authorise their own accounts and arrest the monstrously overdetermined play of significance that operates in and between criticism's 'pre-texts'. They thus repeat Frankenstein's project. But the monster, this time Frankenstein, again eludes capture even as it sustains the pursuit.

Other readings, like Mary Poovey's identification of the novel's critique of male Romantic authorial assertiveness, suggest that the novel manifests some criticism of and resistance to authorial projects. Indeed, the introduction to the novel, itself a retroactive and self-effacing inscription of authorship at the publishers' behest, undermines notions of an originary author by describing the events that led to the moment Shelley became 'possessed' by the idea ( 9). The parting gesture - bidding farewell to the 'hideous progeny' -- also makes no possessive claims on text or monster and institutes a certain distance between the position of the writer of Frankenstein and the totalising and authorial desire of the appropriately named Victor Frankenstein ( 10).

Frankenstein's dream is indeed universal. Having stolen nature's secret of life, he imagines a world flooded with his own immortal and transcendent light, a world in which a 'new species' exists only to adore his godlike mastery ( 54). His pursuit of a totally authoritative position, however, demands the effacement of all others -- others, like darkness and death, on which his project depends: 'to examine the causes of life', Frankenstein states, 'we must first have recourse to death' ( 51). It is these others, moreover, that overturn his exorbitant aspirations. After the moment of the creature's animation, when the idealised and beautiful being appears repulsive, Frankenstein sleeps only to be confronted by a nightmare in which the others he tried to repress all powerfully return: women, sexuality, bodies, decay, death, darkness and madness exert their force. Frankenstein's world has been turned upside down. His dreams, he acknowledges, 'were now become a hell' while 'the change was so rapid, the overthrow complete' ( 59). The scientist-dreamer has undergone a major revolution.

The rotations, furthermore, continue since, having been subjected to the will of his creation, the creator agrees to construct a monstrous female mate. Halfway through his second creation, however, Frankenstein reneges and destroys the female monster before the eyes of her would-be mate. The shifting power-relations between creator and creature are, at this point, disclosed. Enraged, the {55} monster exclaims 'you are my creator, but I am your master; -- obey!' ( 167) Yet neither possesses full mastery over the other. Frankenstein's resistance has provoked the monster's declaration of mastery and begun a dialectic in which authorial power becomes negative: Frankenstein vows to kill the monster, while the monster proceeds to murder almost all his creator's friends and relations. The ensuing, confused pursuit binds the two together and tears them apart in a dialectic of desire, a desire to negatively affirm a singular authority. Excluding all other relations, this polarisation of self and other is so absolute that it can only end in death.

Yet the effects of this monstrously rotating and self-affirming confrontation cannot be contained by a single binary opposition. The reversals spill over to involve and displace other relations. Engendering a multitude of questions about the distinctions between nature and culture, man and woman, appearance and reality, the effects of Frankenstein's authorial project extend beyond him and the monster to implicate everyone, even the innocent, in the text's patterns of destruction. Justine, the Frankenstein family servant, is one such innocent bystander: she wrongly receives a death sentence for the monster's murder of William Frankenstein. The position the novel offers the reader, however, places judicial and religious institutions on trial. Though constructed as a monster, particularly by her confessor, Justine's innocence reflects upon the monstrosity of those that have assigned that identity to her ( 87). The wider effects of this incident disclose cracks in the system that distinguishes truth from reality, justice from injustice, innocence from guilt. Everything is rendered suspect, as the expostulations of Elizabeth, Frankenstein's previously contented fiancee, announce: 'misery has come home' she declares, and she goes on to say that 'men appear to me as monsters thirsting for each other's blood' ( 92). Unable to differentiate falsehood from truth, Elizabeth can only teeter on the precipice of an abyss of indetermination ( 93). The force of the monster as a dangerously necessary but unstable figure of difference has subverted all security and all systems of meaning.

The novel, too, is traversed by this disturbing momentum of monstrosity. Ending with a confusion of opposites that both attract and repel, it cannot resolve the many narrative subject positions that conflict with each other as they contend for sympathy. Light cedes to darkness, the life-giver dies and Walton reluctantly abandons his quest but still gazes on the monster disappearing in the opposite direction. Does Walton return home? Does the monster fulfil his {56} promise to immolate himself on a funeral pyre amid the polar ice? The reader is left suspended uneasily between two poles, without resolution or closure, a position on the margins, neither inside nor outside the text, like the reader of the epistolary novel.

Do the letters that record and disseminate the tangled chains of spoken stories which make up Frankenstein ever arrive at a single and final destination? Or, like Burke's Reflections written in a letter 'intended to have been sent to a gentleman in Paris' and Wollstonecraft's reply in an open letter, do the novel's letters have many addressees, many readers who will be constructed by and also reconstruct the text with different meanings? The monstrous uncertainty produced by such open-endedness might also have a doubled effect: on the one hand it might instil a desire to construct a final, authoritative meaning; on the other it might engender restless critical interrogations.

Such double effects of writing, exceeding the singular limits of binary opposition, parallel the work of deconstruction as Jacques Derrida describes it: deconstruction must, 'through a double gesture, a double science, a double writing - put into practice a reversal of the classical opposition and a general displacement of the system' (195). Difference, though constitutive of opposition, also exceeds it. The instability produced by monstrous difference offers no resting-place for meaning and thus undermines the role of the literary critic, whose job it is to reveal authoritative meaning.

Even Chris Baldick's account of Frankenstein, sensitive as it is to the dangerous displacements of the monster metaphor, returns to the figure of the author and the values of literature in order to contain the play of meanings. Mary Shelley, for Baldick, remains divided in her attitudes to the monster, manifesting an 'anxious liberalism' between conservative and radical views (55). Popular reproductions of the novel, however, conservatively recuperate the story as a cautionary tale (Baldick 62). In contrast, literary criticism liberally allows a semantic plurality, though the author still remains the 'source of this dizzying profusion of meanings' (Baldick 56).

Fashioned within the frames of literature as a 'source' of meanings, the author functions as a limit to the text, a limit that constrains and enables literary interpretation. The privilege accorded the figure of the author, however, depends on the critical positioning of the novel within a literary tradition; until recently such a status has been denied Frankenstein. Tainted by popular cultural reproductions which provided it with a certain visibility, the novel was treated less than {57} liberally by the literary tradition. It was excluded: 'not one of the living novels of the world' for Rosalie Glynn Grylls, it ranked only as a 'minor work' for Sylva Norman. Mary Shelley was only interesting as a biographer's subject, while the novel only received attention in terms of the light it cast on Romanticism. 'A strong, flawed, frequently clumsy novel', its importance for Harold Bloom lies in relation to the Romantic 'mythology of self' that is found in the writings of Blake, Percy Shelley and Byron: 'it lacks the sophistication and imaginative complexity of such works but precisely because of that Frankenstein affords a unique introduction to the archetypal world of the Romantics'. (613)

Excluded from literary status, Frankenstein has existed as a kind of monster, made to demonstrate, by means of its faults, the values of Romanticism. Historically remaining no more than a trace, authorless and monstrous, among its popular reproductions, the novel has always maintained an unstable relationship with literature. A disruptive tension persists even now that the expansion of literature's domain has come to include both text and author, thus endowing them with value. However, the belated and retrospective nature of the inscription of literary value discloses the shifting relations which produce 'literature'.

Frankenstein's monstrous history, it seems, still shadows and exceeds critical strategies that attempt to limit it through the institution of partial distinctions. Moreover, the boundaries that Baldick establishes, between negative and conservative popular culture and the liberal freedoms of the 'literary tradition', do not escape the dangerous reflections of Frankenstein's monstrous language. These reflections question the positioning of literature above the circulation of power (negatively associated with the conservatism of popular culture) and also offer a glimpse of the power relations operating within and on the literary institution.

Power, as Michel Foucault argues, 'produces domains of objects and rituals of truth' (194). Producing new objects for literary consumption and more authors for critical analysis, the literary tradition cannot but be a source of specific forms of power. Indeed, even as it allows many meanings for its textual objects, criticism's regular returns to an author prescribe the limits of enquiry. Such liberalism, or 'anxious liberalism' perhaps, constitutes a kind of critical panopticon that surveys and maintains the boundaries of its own discipline as it enables the production of certain meanings. Held, however uneasily, in place by the anxious liberalism allowed its {58} authors, critical authority can reproduce itself. As Deleuze and Guattari observe in a most Foucauldian moment, 'it is not the slumber of reason that engenders monsters, but vigilant and insomniac rationality' (112). Monsters, excluded from the systems that produce them, keep reason and anxious liberalism on their guard, policing their boundaries and defining themselves within the limits of self-created monstrosity. Frankenstein remains such a monster, retaining the monstrous capacity to undermine and interrogate the inherent instabilities and dangerously necessary differences that sustain all forms of authority.

Works Cited
Baldick, Chris, In Frankenstein's Shadow: Myth, Monstrosity and Nineteenth-century Writing (Oxford: Clarendon, 1987).
Bloom, Harold, 'Frankenstein, or the New Prometheus', Partisan Review 32 (1965): 611-18.

Brooks, Peter, 'Godlike Science/Unhallowed Arts: Language and Monstrosity in Frankenstein', New Literary History 9 (1978): 591-605.

Burke, Edmund, Reflections on the Revolution in France, ed. Conor Cruise O'Brien (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969).

Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Felix, The Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, Helen R. Lane (New York: Viking, 1977).

Derrida, Jacques, 'Signature Event Context', Glyph 1 (1977): 172-97.

Foucault, Michel, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1979).

Glynn Grylls, Rosalie, Mary Shelley: A Biography (London: Oxford University Press, 1938).

Godwin, William, Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, ed. Isaac Kramnick (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985).

Hill, Christopher, 'The Many-Headed Monster in Late Tudor and Early Stuart Political Thinking', in From the Renaissance to the Counter-Reformation, ed. Charles H. Carter (London: Jonathan Cape, 1966), pp. 296-324.

Klancher, Jon P., The Making of English Reading Audiences 1790-1832 (Madison, Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987).

Norman, Sylva, 'Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley', in Shelley and his Circle 1773-1822, Vol. III, ed. Kenneth Neill Cameron (London: Oxford University Press, 1970), pp. 397-422.

Paine, Thomas, The Rights of Man, in The Thomas Paine Reader, eds. Michael Foot and Isaac Kramnick (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985).

Paulson, Ronald, 'Gothic Fiction and the French Revolution', English Literary History 48 (1981): 532-54.

Poovey, Mary, 'My Hideous Progeny: Mary Shelley and the Feminization of Romanticism', PMLA 95 (1980): 332-47.

Shelley, Mary, Frankenstein or The Modern Prometheus, ed. M. K. Joseph (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969).

Sterrenburg, Lee, 'Mary Shelley's Monster: Politics and Psyche in Frankenstein', in The Endurance of Frankenstein, eds. George Levine and U. C. Knoepflmacher (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1979), pp. 143-71.

Wollstonecraft, Mary, A Vindication of the Rights of Men, in Burke, Paine, Godwin, and the Revolution Controversy, ed. Marilyn Butler (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984).

Wordsworth, William, The Prose Works of William Wordsworth, eds. W. J. B. Owen and Jane Worthington Smyser (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974).

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Botting, "Frankenstein and the Language of Monstrosity"

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51} Monsters appear in literary andpolitical writings to signal both a terrible threat to established orders and a call to arms that demands the unification and protection of authorised values. Symptoms of anxiety and instability, monsters frequently emerge in revolutionary periods as dark and ominous doubles restlessly announcing an explosion of apocalyptic energy.

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Abstract

David B. Morris writes of the Gothic sublime that:

In exploring the entanglements of love and terror, the Gothic novel pursues a version of the sublime utterly without transcendence. It is a vertiginous and plunging - not a soaring - sublime, which takes us deep within rather than far beyond the human sphere. The eighteenth-century sublime always implied (but managed to restrain) the threat of lost control. Gothic sublimity - by releasing into fiction images and desires long suppressed, deeply hidden, forced into silence - greatly intensifies the dangers of an uncontrollable release from restraint, (p. 306)

Although I take issue with Morris's claims that the Gothic sublime is little more than a repressed version of the uncanny, I do acknowledge that his identification of an inherent instability within the Gothic sublime is a useful starting-point for our analysis. This idea of instability can also be extended to accounts of the Romantic sublime; an analysis of which enables us to bring together a Gothic discourse and certain Romantic philosophies.

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Moral Worth Aesthetic Judgement Paradise Lost Poetic Language Religious Sense

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Notes

See Jackson, Fantasy: the Literature of Subversion pp. 49-53. Her arguments concerning the relationship between I/not-I are drawn from Tzvetan Todorov's, The Fantastic: a Structural Approach to a Literary Genre, trans. R. Howard (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1975).

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David B. Morris writes of the Gothic sublime that: In exploring the entanglements of love and terror, the Gothic novel pursues a version of the sublime utterly without transcendence. It is a vertiginous and plunging - not a soaring - sublime, which takes us deep within rather than far beyond the human sphere.

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With ghosts, spacious castles, and fainting heroes, Gothic fiction conveys both thrill and intrigue. Gothic literature is a combination of horror fiction and Romantic thought; Romantic thought encompasses awe toward nature. Essentially, Romanticism is a reaction against the Enlightenment, a time that revolutionized scientific thought, and emphasizes emotional response and intuition over clinical knowledge. Romantic literature elicits personal pleasure from natural beauty, and Gothic fiction takes this aesthetic reaction and subverts it by creating delight and confusion from terror. This use of terror is called the sublime, which is an important tool in these narratives. Examples of Gothic literature range from dark romances to supernatural mysteries.

In Gothic novels, no matter the setting or villain, the sublime exists as a different experience than appreciating natural beauty. In fact, this concept deals with how authors capture their characters' trauma and fear. It is important to look at the sublime in the lens of both the characters' experiences and the real world contexts that influence them.

Beyond identifying the sublime, a crucial part of looking at this technique is seeing how the fears present in Gothic literature factor into real life concerns, such as the enforced roles and restrictions faced by women. The use of terror illuminates how the marginalized, once given a voice, cope with their harrowing predicaments, and reading about these struggles helps foster comprehension and empathy.

Defining the Sublime

What separates experiencing the sublime from experiencing beauty is the disruption of harmony. As stated above, it shows elements of Romantic reactions to human experience while utilizing fear as well. According to Edmund Burke, the imagination experiences both thrill and fear through what is "dark, uncertain, and confused." In setting the sublime apart from beauty, the sublime creates more than a positive, appreciative response to an aesthetic, such as a beautiful painting or sunlit meadow. The sublime stems from potent awe and terror that stresses someone's limits, surpassing all other responses and overloading the recipient in both their revulsion and fascination.

In regards to the Romantic view of the environment, the sublime can occur when natural grandeur overwhelms an individual to the point of causing fright or a feeling of helpless insignificance. Overall, approaching the sublime occurs when a sight or experience is "awesome" or " awful" in the old meaning of both words: characterized by or inspiring awe, and awe is an emotion containing fear, wonder, and reverence. The sublime questions the stark dichotomy between pleasure and pain because a fear-invoking scene can also cause wonder, an odd sort of delight. In a contemporary sense, it could be viewed as watching a train wreck: horrifying, but captivating to the viewer.

Because of its potency and Burke's gendered views, he viewed the Romantic or Gothic sublime as a more masculine and powerful experience than beauty, which he perceived as feminine, and therefore more fragile and superficial. However, Mary Wollstonecraft, an English writer and avid women's rights advocate, argued against this perspective and its depiction of women as inherently weak and passive. For Wollstonecraft, the sublime dealt with the self and its subjective views of society and spectacular natural scenery.

Interestingly enough, Ann Radcliffe, the English writer who pioneered the Gothic novel (as well as the "Female Gothic" novel, Gothic literature for women, by women), maintained that horror and terror exist as separate entities, and that terror, not horror, creates the sublime because, while horror is definite, terror provokes ambiguous emotions, which in turn "expands the soul and awakens the faculties to a high degree of life." Horror involves witnessing the monster, of seeing blood or a corpse, while terror burrows into an individual's unclear psyche and entails multiple, conflicting emotions stirring at once.

Gender and Evoking the Sublime

Going off of Mary Wollstonecraft's view of the sublime as a part of her relationship to society (and how 19th century Western culture treated women's intelligence and education), the sublime, through overwrought sensory details, can reveal what scares the character based on real struggles. For women in Victorian England (1837-1901), the sublime is triggered through a fear of confinement and suppression based on societal expectations; an example of this fear appears in Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre .

In the beginning, Jane experiences terror when her aunt locks her inside the red-room, the former chambers of her dead uncle. As her imprisonment lingers, the experience takes its toll on Jane, and she soon believes her uncle's ghost, a patriarchal symbol, will rise and attack her. She states, "My heart beat thick, my head grew hot; a sound filled my ears, which I deemed the rushing of wings; something seemed near me; I was oppressed, suffocated; endurance broke down; I rushed to the door and shook the lock in desperate effort" (11).

Jane Eyre becomes enraptured in an experience that affects her on both a physical and emotional level, an experience that strains her, that challenges her and extends past the capacity of her imagination. The sublime creates hysteria, and the concept of "hysteria" derives from the archaic belief that cis women act in excess or have uncontrollable, irrational bouts of emotions when their uterus does not function properly. Considering the Victorian woman's experience, as well as earlier ones (though published in the Victorian era, Bronte set the novel in the Georgian era) the red-room may be red for a variety of symbolic reasons: menstruation (Jane is ten at the novel's beginning and will soon enter puberty); passion; torment; blood.

Furthermore, Jane's imprisonment in the red-room stems from punishment for confronting her male cousin after he hits her and insults her because she is dependent on his family and because the books she reads are not her own. She suffers for rebelling, for educating herself and living in an environment where she does not possess her own independence, so the surreality of her break with reality emphasizes the terror of her experience as a girl approaching womanhood.

In Jane Eyre, this issue also manifests in the character of Bertha Mason, the wife of Jane's love interest, who spends several years locked in an attic because of her mental instability. Because of society's treatment of mental illness, especially in regards to Bertha's gender and racial identity, Bertha becomes as trapped as Jane was at the start of the novel, and her ordeal culminates in a result that is both terrifying to witness but dazzling and gripping in its own terrible way: fire.

Frankenstein: Awe-Inspiring Feats and Standards of Beauty

Mary Shelley's novel Frankenstein deals with many complex themes while invoking the sublime. She considered the novel her own monster, with herself as the creator. While many of her male contemporaries mainly worked with poetry and operated in exclusive chats, Mary Shelley wrote a complex novel at a young age.

The narrative deals with the impact of nature. In fact, Frankenstein challenges the aspect of nature itself as the titular character, Victor Frankenstein, researches both modern science and alchemy to defeat death. In terms of the environment, the Monster comes to life due to a violent storm. Before that, Victor speaks of feeling jubilation from a startling and intriguing natural event.

When I was about fifteen years old we had retired to our house near Belrive, when we witnessed a most violent and terrible thunderstorm. It advanced from behind the mountains of Jura, and the thunder burst at once with frightful loudness from various quarters of the heavens. I remained, while the storm lasted, watching its progress with curiosity and delight. As I stood at the door, on a sudden I beheld a stream of fire issue from an old and beautiful oak which stood about twenty yards from our house; and so soon as the dazzling light vanished, the oak had disappeared, and nothing remained but a blasted stump. When we visited it the next morning, we found the tree shattered in a singular manner. It was not splintered by the shock, but entirely reduced to thin ribbons of wood. I never beheld anything so utterly destroyed.

This scene not only shows the sublime, but foreshadows Victor's ruination. Victor's own accomplishment is an awe-inspiring feat; it is an action that incites inspiration and terror as the Monster becomes a strikingly intelligent living being, but suffers marginalization because he is the embodiment of the sublime and not beauty. The Monster is painful to look at, and therefore mistreated and accosted.

Victor becomes the modern Prometheus, the Titan who brought fire to humanity at a terrible cost. By mirroring the Titan's fate, Victor performs a grand feat, fueled by knowledge and breaking boundaries, and suffers not only for his transgression, but for neglecting his grotesque creation, his child, for a superficial reason.

Though he initially seeks for his creation to be beautiful, the actual result elicits terror. Victor states, "No mortal could support the horror of that countenance." When the living creature moves, it then "became a thing such as even Dante could not have conceive." The situation, as miraculous and groundbreaking as it is, becomes Victor's own personal hell. As his life unravels, the reader becomes the recipient of a sublime experience: as horrific as the downfall is to witness, the narrative propels the reader forward to the bleak and devastating conclusion.

One could also determine that this Gothic tragedy also displays elements of dissecting the fears of Victorian cis women, though the Monster's creation and how people treat him have also become representations of brilliant but morally-questioned modern innovations (genetically modified food; cloning animals) and contemporary marginalization (issues of race, sexuality, transgender identity, disability, etc.).

Concerning the fears of Victorian cis women, Mary Shelley's mother, the aforementioned Mary Wollstonecraft, died from a post-birth infection, and Shelley herself suffered from miscarriages and the deaths of infant children and dreamed of one of her babies returning to life. It is entirely possible that Frankenstein contains Shelley's thoughts on both the wonder and trauma of childbirth, since Mary's own birth caused her mother's infection and death.

In the preface for Frankenstein, Mary Shelley writes, "And now, once again, I bid my hideous progeny go forth and prosper. I have an affection for it, for it was the offspring of happy days, when death and grief were but words, which found no true echo in my heart." The Monster and his creation are not only representations of the sublime, but the novel itself, for it exists as both an entity of woe and happiness concerning the author's past, present, and future misfortunes.

As an important part of Gothic works, the sublime helps readers uncover aspects of humanity. The commingling delight and terror deal with personal emotions and experiences for both the characters and the works' authors, as well as the audience. It is essential to not only be able to define and find the sublime in Gothic literature, but to also determine the causes of fear in hopes that the reader can empathize with the complex, overwhelming struggles presented in various works. Though this is a 19th century concept, the pivotal issues presented in Gothic works such as Jane Eyre and Frankenstein reverberate in modern culture.

What do you think? .

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With ghosts, spacious castles, and fainting heroes, Gothic fiction conveys both thrill and intrigue. Gothic literature is a combination of horror fiction and Romantic thought; Romantic thought encompasses awe toward nature. Essentially, Romanticism is a reaction against the Enlightenment, a time that revolutionized scientific thought, and emphasizes emotional response and intuition over clinical knowledge.

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Love, Mystery and Misery: Feeling in Gothic Fiction

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Love, Mystery and Misery: Feeling in Gothic Fiction

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Coral Ann Howells

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The current Gothic revival in literature and film encourages us to look again to the earliest Gothic novels written beween 1790 and 1820, when Gothic was the most popular kind of fiction in England. Dr. Howells proposes a radical reassessment of these novels to emphasize their importance as experiments in imaginative writing.

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Botting - Frankenstein, Criticism & Theory

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Botting - Frankenstein, Criticism & Theory

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The mid-18th Century - an era of dark, satanic mills at home and nightmarish social upheaval abroad - saw public taste shift from traditional tales of romance and adventure to an appetite for terror.

It is a wide-ranging genre which includes Frankenstein, Dracula and Wuthering Heights. The success of recent novels such as Twilight continue its popularity. This timeline spotlights key moments in the evolution of spine-tingling Gothic stories.

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Spine-chillers and suspense: A timeline of Gothic fiction

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The mid-18th Century - an era of dark, satanic mills at home and nightmarish social upheaval abroad - saw public taste shift from traditional tales of romance and adventure to an appetite for terror. It is a wide-ranging genre which includes Frankenstein, Dracula and Wuthering Heights.

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Nightmare! The Birth of Victorian Horror: Dracula (Full programme, feat. Eileen Daly)

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The uncanny is the psychological experience of something as strangely familiar, rather than simply mysterious. It may describe incidents where a familiar thing or event is encountered in an unsettling, eerie, or taboo context.

Ernst Jentsch set out the concept of the uncanny later elaborated on by Sigmund Freud in his 1919 essay Das Unheimliche, which explores the eeriness of dolls and waxworks. For Freud, the uncanny locates the strangeness in the ordinary. Expanding on the idea, psychoanalytic theorist Jacques Lacan wrote that the uncanny places us "in the field where we do not know how to distinguish bad and good, pleasure from displeasure", resulting in an irreducible anxiety that gestures to the Real. The concept has since been taken up by a variety of thinkers and theorists such as roboticist Masahiro Mori's uncanny valley and Julia Kristeva's concept of abjection.[citation needed ]

Philosopher F. W. J. Schelling raised the question of the uncanny in his late Philosophie der Mythologie of 1835, postulating that the Homeric clarity was built upon a prior repression of the uncanny.

In The Will to Power manuscript, German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche refers to nihilism as "the uncanniest of all guests" and, earlier, in On the Genealogy of Morals he argues it is the "will to truth" that has destroyed the metaphysics that underpins the values of Western culture. Hence, he coins the phrase "European nihilism" to describe the condition that afflicts those Enlightenment ideals that seemingly hold strong values yet undermine themselves.

Uncanniness was first explored psychologically by Ernst Jentsch in a 1906 essay, On the Psychology of the Uncanny. Jentsch defines the Uncanny as: being a product of "...intellectual uncertainty; so that the uncanny would always, as it were, be something one does not know one's way about in. The better oriented in his environment a person is, the less readily will he get the impression of something uncanny in regard to the objects and events in it." He expands upon its use in fiction:

In telling a story one of the most successful devices for easily creating uncanny effects is to leave the reader in uncertainty whether a particular figure in the story is a human being or an automaton and to do it in such a way that his attention is not focused directly upon his uncertainty, so that he may not be led to go into the matter and clear it up immediately.

Jentsch identifies German writer E. T. A. Hoffmann as a writer who uses uncanny effects in his work, focusing specifically on Hoffmann's story "The Sandman" (" Der Sandmann"), which features a lifelike doll, Olympia.

The concept of the Uncanny was later elaborated on and developed by Sigmund Freud in his 1919 essay "The Uncanny", which also draws on the work of Hoffmann (whom Freud refers to as the "unrivalled master of the uncanny in literature"). However, he criticizes Jentsch's belief that Olympia is the central uncanny element in the story (" The Sandman"):

I cannot think - and I hope most readers of the story will agree with me - that the theme of the doll Olympia, who is to all appearances a living being, is by any means the only, or indeed the most important, element that must be held responsible for the quite unparalleled atmosphere of uncanniness evoked by the story.

Instead, Freud draws on a wholly different element of the story, namely, "the idea of being robbed of one's eyes", as the "more striking instance of uncanniness" in the tale.

Freud goes on, for the remainder of the essay, to identify uncanny effects that result from instances of "repetition of the same thing," linking the concept to that of the repetition compulsion. He includes incidents wherein one becomes lost and accidentally retraces one's steps, and instances wherein random numbers recur, seemingly meaningfully (here Freud may be said to be prefiguring the concept that Jung would later refer to as synchronicity). He also discusses the uncanny nature of Otto Rank's concept of the "double".

Freud specifically relates an aspect of the Uncanny derived from German etymology. By contrasting the German adjective unheimlich with its base word heimlich ("concealed, hidden, in secret"), he proposes that social taboo often yields an aura not only of pious reverence but even more so of horror and even disgust, as the taboo state of an item gives rise to the commonplace assumption that that which is hidden from public eye (cf. the eye or sight metaphor) must be a dangerous threat and even an abomination - especially if the concealed item is obviously or presumingly sexual in nature. Basically, the Uncanny is what unconsciously reminds us of our own , our forbidden and thus repressed impulses - especially when placed in a context of uncertainty that can remind one of infantile beliefs in the omnipotence of thought. Such uncanny elements are perceived as threatening by our ridden with oedipal guilt as it fears symbolic castration by punishment for deviating from societal norms. Thus, the items and individuals that we project our own repressed impulses upon become a most uncanny threat to us, uncanny monsters and freaks akin to fairy-tale folk-devils, and subsequently often become scapegoats we blame for all sorts of perceived miseries, calamities, and maladies.

What interests us most in this long extract is to find that among its different shades of meaning the word heimlich exhibits one which is identical with its opposite, unheimlich. What is heimlich thus comes to be unheimlich. [...] In general we are reminded that the word heimlich is not unambiguous, but belongs to two sets of ideas, which, without being contradictory, are yet very different: on the one hand it means what is familiar and agreeable, and on the other, what is concealed and kept out of sight. Unheimlich is customarily used, we are told, as the contrary only of the first signification of heimlich, and not of the second. [...] On the other hand, we notice that Schelling says something which throws quite a new light on the concept of the Unheimlich, for which we were certainly not prepared. According to him, everything is unheimlich that ought to have remained secret and hidden but has come to light.

[...]

A study of dreams, phantasies and myths has taught us that anxiety about one's eyes, the fear of going blind [as used as a central theme in "The Sandman"], is often enough a substitute for the dread of being castrated. The self-blinding of the mythical criminal, Oedipus, was simply a mitigated form of the punishment of castration - the only punishment that was adequate for him by the lex talionis. [...] All further doubts are removed when we learn the details of their 'castration complex' from the analysis of neurotic patients, and realize its immense importance in their mental life.

After Freud, Jacques Lacan, in his 1962-1963 seminar "L'angoisse" ("Anxiety"), used the Unheimlich "via regia" to enter into the territory of Angst. Lacan showed how the same image that seduces the subject, trapping him in the narcissistic impasse, may suddenly, by a contingency, show that it is dependent on something, some hidden object, and so the subject may grasp at the same time that he is not autonomous (5 December 1962). For example, and as a paradigm, Guy de Maupassant, in his story "Le Horla", describes a man who suddenly may see his own back in the mirror. His back is there, but it is deprived of the gaze of the subject. It appears as a strange object, until he feels it is his own. There is no cognitive dissonance here, we rather cross all possible cognition, to find ourselves in the field where we do not know how to distinguish bad and good, pleasure from displeasure. And this is the signal of anxiety: the signal of the real, as irreducible to any signifier.

This concept is closely related to Julia Kristeva's concept of abjection, where one reacts adversely to something forcefully cast out of the symbolic order. Abjection can be uncanny in that the observer can recognize something within the abject, possibly of what it was before it was 'cast out', yet be repulsed by what it is that caused it to be cast out to begin with. Kristeva lays special emphasis on the uncanny return of the past abject with relation to the 'uncanny stranger'.

Sadeq Rahimi has noted a common relationship between the uncanny and direct or metaphorical visual references, which he explains in terms of basic processes of ego development, specifically as developed by Lacan's theory of the mirror stage. Rahimi presents a wide range of evidence from various contexts to demonstrate how uncanny experiences are typically associated with themes and metaphors of vision, blindness, mirrors and other optical tropes. He also presents historical evidence showing strong presence of ocular and specular themes and associations in the literary and psychological tradition out of which the notion of 'the uncanny' emerged. According to Rahimi, instances of the uncanny like doppelgängers, ghosts, , alter egos, self-alienations and split personhoods, phantoms, twins, living dolls, etc. share two important features: that they are closely tied with visual tropes, and that they are variations on the theme of doubling of the ego.

Roboticist Masahiro Mori's essay on human reactions to humanlike entities, Bukimi no Tani Genshō (Valley of Eeriness Phenomenon), describes the gap between familiar living people and their also familiar inanimate representations, such as dolls, puppets, mannequins, prosthetic hands, and android robots. The entities in the valley are between these two poles of common phenomena. Mori has stated that he made the observation independently of Jentsch and Freud, though a link was forged by Reichardt and translators who rendered bukimi as uncanny.

Canny is from the Anglo-Saxon root ken: "knowledge, understanding, or cognizance; mental perception: an idea beyond one's ken." Thus the uncanny is something outside one's familiar knowledge or perceptions.

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The uncanny is the psychological experience of something as strangely familiar, rather than simply mysterious. It may describe incidents where a familiar thing or event is encountered in an unsettling, eerie, or taboo context. Ernst Jentsch set out the concept of the uncanny later elaborated on by Sigmund Freud in his 1919 essay Das Unheimliche, which explores the eeriness of dolls and waxworks.