Symbols :

The audience is introduced to the Yorkshire Moors - a desolate and vast setting in between Thrushcross Grange and Wuthering Heights, as a liminal space for Heathcliff and Catherine to express their untamed love on otherwise barren land. It is representative of the affair between these two characters as they flourish despite all of the circumstances around them prohibiting this. This is further equipped by the wild and tempestuous winds "blowing over the edge" as an extended metaphor for the psychological extremes of the human experience in the presence of constant repression.

Thrushcross Grange serves as a foil to Wuthering Heights in the sense that it is the stately home of the Lintons and a depiction of civility, wealth and higher education. It is a place of reform and social conformity, evident because of Catherine's transformation into a socialite after residing there, as well as the marriage between Linton and Catherine, symbolising her acceptance of social structures and transactional love. Even the sibilance and consonance embedded within "Thrushcross Grange" make it harder to read, underscoring how difficult it is to access and how it is less penetrable for both the readers and for Heathcliff, who had never been accepted into a higher society as a boy. Completely juxtaposing this, "Wuthering Heights" is a name that is almost satisfactory to say, and the vowels mimic how emotions are constantly pushed out of the characters and the reader also. Despite the horrific memories associated with this place, it stands proud and exposed to extreme natures, always accepting overwhelming emotion.

Windows held significant meaning in this novel as expressions of yearning for freedom. They are cruel reminders for the characters, as they are exposed to what lies on the other side, while they themselves remain trapped. When Catherine is feverish, she demands that the windows be open as she is "yearning for the wildness of the moors". She wishes to escape her confinement from the shackles of societal expectations and instead find solace in the open. Furthermore, Heathcliff is found dead next to an open window, which symbolises that the barrier between Catherine and Heathcliff was finally removed, and it is no longer a liminal space between life and death for the two because they can finally access each other in a realm where social structure does not exist.

The supernatural is a concept that is introduced throughout this book through the ghost of Catherine and contributes to the novel's gothic nature and Brontë's rejection of neoclassicism and the Enlightenment period as she steers towards disembodied spirits. Despite ghosts being synonymous with evil and haunting creatures, Heathcliff begs for Catherine to haunt him because he craves her presence overwhelmingly. Without Catherine, he is hollow and "stuck in an abyss," and even after death, she completes him. Her ghost is a reminder of their intense feelings for each other as they remain co-dependent well into adulthood.

The love between Heathcliff and Catherine can be classified as a dark and daunting obsession as they manage to haunt the narratives of each other's lives. "Whatever our souls are made of, his mine are the same." Catherine does not submit to Heathcliff as one would expect she had to for Linton; she truly views him as an equal. She is not grateful for Heathcliff's love because she knows she feels it just as intensely; her passion for Heathcliff is equally rivalled by his for her. This is unusual among the majority of women in society at the time, who accepted that they were a commodity and would never really experience love due to their standing as the submissive sex, that they were only vessels of pleasure and obedience. Catherine proves herself to be not only a child and a mother but also her own headstrong person, consumed by human experience.

As the protagonist of Wuthering Heights, Heathcliff is the archetype of a Byronic Hero. He is characterised to be both a cynic and mysterious and intelligent simultaneously, and a villain as a consequence of his circumstances. He is a romantic hero who suffers due to the imperfections around him and turns into an antagonist for Hareton who still idolises him in spite of the torment he is subjected to under Heathcliff. His wife, Isabella, wonders if Heathcliff is even human and yet the audience becomes aware throughout the book that he is capable of such intense and true love. He is talented and proves himself to be worthy of the attention of the upper classes in three years, but rejects any true joy in his life and only finds it in making other people's lives Hell just as he once lived through. He is deeply flawed, but also such a satisfactory character for the audience to experience as they see him be granted his commuppance.

Another Gothic trope is the formula of the anachronic narrative with both prolepsis and analepsis. The leaps in time disorient the reader's perception of characters, and they are further removed from the truth of the story because Heathcliff's life is told by Nelly Dean from Lockwood's point of view. There is uncertainty with the reliability of the narrator, and it represents how complex the truth can be when dealing with ambiguous situations that have no particularly happy ending. It demonstrates how the past always haunts the present and how events due to intergenerational trauma can never explicitly be characterised as deserved or damning.

This Beauty and the Beast motif is used to express forbidden love and desire between the monster and its victims, wherein the "beast" represents the ID and the "beauty" is the SUPEREGO. A man's consciousness fluctuates between the two, and a metamorphosis into the beast is an attempt to be free from societal structures and indulge in fantasies. There is a constant war of the self.

Vampires are vehicles to explore "taboo" topics such as incest, homosexuality, and promiscuity. Especially with the motif of the beast, it delves into how we are disgusted by sexual pleasures when young and then inevitably overcome the disgust to appreciate the beauty in it.

SEXUALITY:

There was more of an anxiety about male sexuality at the turn of the 20th century - the repressed nature of masculinity and sexuality, rather than worries about female sexuality.

Dracula only ever partook in heterosexual bites, and sexualised women in the book almost always perish. He did not liberate his victims from the strictures of society but introduced ones of his own. Evidently, he fits more into the "beauty" archetype despite his "monstrousity".

Dracula is Stoker's response to Le Fanu's portrayal of female empowerment in Carmilla. Where Le Fanu frees his female characters from positions in the male kinship system, Stoker reinstates them in that system under oppression.

Lucy and Mina are used as points of contact with men's blood through the women's blood transfusions to form an exchange of fluids with the men. This is reflective of compulsory heterosexuality, which is a formative part of human relationships. Men in the 19th century were encouraged to establish bonds through sports, political parties, and smoking clubs, among other activities. To distinguish between homosocial and homosexual, women were included in the relationship to form a safe triangular configuration rather than a 'dangerous' and linear male-to-male union. Women were used as tools to enable male relationships.

Bruno Bettelheim: Beasts function as a veiled symbol for sexuality experienced as disgust before one reaches maturity and discovers the pleasure that can be derived.

Both Carmilla and Hyde are beasts with unbridled passion and impetuosity despite their starkly different descriptions.

While Hyde was deemed "downright detestable", Carmilla had features acknowledged as "engaging and lovely".

Darwin's theory of evolution played quite heavily into how Hyde was perceived, and both social Darwinism as well as physical Darwinism were factored into this. Cesare Lombroso - "L'uomo Delinquent (criminal man) said there were evolutionary throwbacks in our midst which were closer to apes than the modern man, and they were 'animalistic and criminal'.

The "beast" is almost infantile to society due to their theories on evolution, and it also acts to increase the appeal of the beauty character as motherlike. Laura and Jekyll had a parental persona with an urge to take care.

MOTHER:

An internalisation of the maternal role as the only constraint capable of preventing masculinity from becoming a destructive anti-social force. EG: The Beast does have an empathetic connection to beauty and fulfils the role of the mother and one that desires to be mothered. Humans often seek to recreate the intensity of that bond between mother and child.

Both Laura and Carmilla lose their mothers, and Carmilla is separated from a female guardian when young. Their female relationship trumps family ties, and they merge into a union that the men who watch them never see. Carmilla establishes a matriarchy when she invades her victim's house, depriving them of their father's dominance and power. When Carmilla first visits Laura, Laura is young and neglected. Carmilla immediately assumes the role of comforter, but suddenly, roles are inverted when Carmilla suckles on the child's chest as punishment. There is a withdrawal of the mother, and a demonic presence of the antimother replaces it. In this way, the female character is fierce, masculine, and men become terrorised and submissive - feminine. There is an archetypal androgyny in vampires that confuses the audience because of the instinctive tendency to polarise gender.

ATTRACTION/REPULSION:

Laura found herself being continuously attracted to and repulsed by Carmilla.

"I heard the light step of Carmilla at the drawing room door" Hope or fear?

They convey their affection for each other quite openly, and while Carmilla loves Laura entirely, Laura is both distressed and enthralled by Carmilla.

They have a symbiotic relationship and constantly point out being one. "I live in you." When Laura has a nightmare about herself, she is convinced that it is actually Carmilla who is being murdered. To this, she says, "Live in your warm life and you shall die sweetly into mine." Their love is so strong and they complete each other to the point that the antagonist and protagonist merge into one.

Similarly, Jekyll is the only character who is undisturbed and accepting of Hyde's appearance. Hyde almost played the role of Jekyll's secret mistress and was provided with a secret house, bank account and life. Hyde was also found to be "weeping like a woman", which contributes to how the beast is inherently feminine. Stevenson does not care about what perversion Hyde was involved in, only the hypocrisy of Jekyll, as he both abhorred and gloried in Hyde's activities. Jekyll attempts to create a self free from the constraints of society, free from the influence of beauty, desperate to live without the push and pull of two extremes.

DRACULA AS BEAUTY:

He did have qualities of a beast/ monster:

"aquiline nose"

"peculiarly arched nostrils"

"teeth poke out over hungry lips"

• But his lips showed "astonishing vitality"

A clear show of attraction versus repulsion^

He is defined more clearly by the beauty archetype because he reinstates the patriarchy, heterosexuality and exogamy.

He treats the women he vamps as free to be colonised. Female vampires represent overtly sexual women, and their execution is symbolic of rape.

Lucy's sexual appetite is quite ripe before Dracula's arrival, but afterwards she is delineated as whore(vampire) or an angel (marriage and mother) - both thoroughly male-dominated.

ID and SUPEREGO are the variants for the same primitive energy. The ID has become its own mirror - vampire casts no shadow.

The mother asks her daughter to fend for the farm herself, tired of rejecting patriarchal advances, but trains her daughter how to do so.

The daughter fails to restrain herself, so the cycle continues, and she becomes a victim of his abuse. He forces her into companionship, and she fakes her death.

He mourns her before she really leaves.

THE ELF KING^

Depicts what happens when one no longer feels an obligation to look inward at the corruption of their soul but is concerned only with maintaining their material beauty.

Lord Henry gives him a language and an excuse to be cruel. Pleasure becomes his life's philosophy.

• Every portrait that is painted with a feeling is a portrait of the artist, not the sitter. The sitter is merely the accident, the occasion.

• Every impulse we strive to strangle broods in the mind and poisons us. The body sins once and is done with its sin, for action is a mode of purification.

• Nowadays, people know the price of everything and the value of nothing.

• You will always be loved, and you will always be loved by love

• The more keenly I feel, whatever was good for our fathers is not good enough for us

• People are very fond of giving away what they need most themselves.

• To define is to limit

Homosexual desire - the love that dares not speak its name - the whole novel is a sybaritic ode to homosexuality.

• Greek Imagery - Hellenism

• Admiration of beautiful young men

• Secret meetings

• Living a double life

• Luxury

  All Victorian attributes of homosexuality

Firstly, by Basil, who is so absorbed that he offers his whole soul to Dorian. But is also met with Dorian falls for Henry as his philosophical mentor as an older man who enables him to conflate pleasure with philosophy and truth.