ABSTRACTION
The Oxford English
Dictionary records early 19th Century usage of “abstraction” as secret
or dishonest removal of wealth; “abstraction” as the consideration of qualities
independently of material substance, especially concerning wealth and property,
came into use in the later part of the Century. Gothic narratives often
explore notions of fractured identities and a sense of dislocation that
is either or both spatial and psychological, but rising capitalism and
the abstraction of wealth from physical property was among the biggest
anxieties of the time, turning tangible security into an ephemeral, easily
transferable insecurity. Narratives like Jekyll and Hyde, The Hound of
the Baskervilles and Uncle Silas demonstrate the temptation such wealth
has for criminal activity. The Bottle Imp gives a chilling account of how
abstraction leads to a simultaneous conflation of the ideas of wealth and
happiness, and the abstraction of self from society: one no longer feels
any sense of responsibility about the fate of others. Financial abstraction
also blurs the boundaries between social classes and even between races,
since wealth, in all its dangerous fluidity, levels the playing field and
contributing to late Victorian anxieties about the self and the potential
for displacement or even erasure. The Gothic authors’ use of fragmentary,
epistolary and therefore inherently unreliable narratives (eg. Frankenstein;
Dracula) can therefore be said to reflect a desire to record the subjective
and personal in an effort to prevent the complete abstraction of the self.
(Annabelle Bok,
2006)
Androgyny
Androgyny took
on a prominent place in describing the sexual orientation of characters
in fin de siêcle Gothic literature. In a biological context, being
androgynous suggests a combination of male and female sexual organs and
characteristics. In Gothic literature, to be androgynous is to be neither
specifically masculine nor feminine thus creating an amorphous character
with an ambiguous sexual orientation. Some authors combine the biological
and social definitions of androgyny to the characterization of their characters.
Androgynous behaviour is exhibited in marginalized characters such as the
foreign other and females to mirror cultural and sexual anxieties in this
period of enormous social turbulence. Androgyny is a fin de siêcle
symptom exemplifying the Victorians’ frustration, confusion and resentment
towards the strict demarcation of gender roles. Gothic literature thus
uses the site of androgyny to contest with gender conventions and experiment
with mutable forms of sexuality. This is seen in recent times where several
feminists advocate androgyny as a substitute to patriarchy. In Dracula,
Bram Stoker describes Mina Harker as a motherly female with a “woman’s
heart” who interestingly, also has “man’s brain.” Androgyny is also manifested
in the hyper-masculine Dracula who is also hyper-feminine at the same time.
He is at once the pursuer of virginal females and the pursued by a band
of masculine men. Hyde in Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Doctor Jekyll
and Mr. Hyde is feminized with his “dwarfish” stature. Androgyny can then
be seen as a projection of various anxieties in the fin de siêcle
Victorian period. This is due to the emergence of the new woman, fall of
the family and the questioning of assumptions of being either man or woman
in the Victorian society.
(Metta
Yang, 2004)
Gothic
Atavism
The
term atavism is usually used to express the recurrence or reappearance
of certain ‘primitive’ traits, physical or psychical, which presumably
match those of an ancestral form. This notion of reversion and evolutionary
‘throwbacks’ was closely linked to criminality and class anxieties (see
http://www.criminology.fsu.edu/crimtheory/ lombroso.htm for more information
about Cesare Lombroso’s theory of the born deviant) in the nineteenth century,
and often serves an interesting function mostly in fin de siecle gothic
literature, particularly texts (such as R.L Stevenson’s Dr Jekyll and Mr
Hyde, A.C Doyle’s Hound of the Baskervilles or H.G Well’s The Island of
Dr Moreau) which engage with bodily monstrosity and pseudo-scientific discourses
about degeneration.
Urban problems of rising crime and poverty, as well as post-Darwinian anxieties
about the increasing destabilization of human identity in late Victorian
society seem to become embodied and ‘safely’ displaced through the repugnant
form of the regressive atavistic human, whose moral and behavioral aberrations
are pre-figured through his/her animalistic physiognomy. As such, tropes
of degeneration such as blood, heredity, bestiality and even crumbling
structures or spaces that are tied to a stagnant but still potent past
frequently crop up in various gothic texts. In imperial-colonial gothic
discourse, these atavistic elements can be read as a reflection of anxieties
about the decay of the gentry and the declining colonial enterprise.
Gothic narratives typically subvert and complicate these conventional perceptions
of the ‘social other’ by problematizing the supposedly clear (but ultimately
revealed as superficial or at the least, unreliable) distinctness between
the ‘proper’, respectable self and its anti-thesis. Via characteristic
gothic devices such as doubling, irony and linguistic /narrative indeterminacy
(which highlight the uneasy closeness between these two binaristic oppositions),
the geographically, socially and/or biologically transgressive figure of
the atavist becomes even more perturbing because he/she blurs the established
boundaries drawn between the civilized and the savage, mirroring back to
society its own fears and concerns (racial decline, the overlapping of
animal and human, etc). Thus, the atavistic being not only presents a direct
threat to civilization, but even more disturbingly, undermines the scientific
taxonomies and social classifications that it rests on from within.
For more detailed examples of such readings about the atavist’s function
in gothic literature, see Kelly Hurley’s The Gothic Body: Sexuality, Materialism,
and Degeneration at the ‘Fin de siecle’ or Stephen Arata’s article The
Sedulous ape: Atavism, Professionalism, and Stevenson's 'Jekyll and Hyde.'
(Quek Sherlyn,
2004)
Beauty
Beauty
is often juxtaposed to what is man-made or corrupted. Victor in Frankenstein,
in his scientific transgression, fails to enjoy the ‘charms of nature.’
(53) Hence it can be an indication of the state of one’s inner mind. The
beauty of nature is pervasive in Frankenstein and it contributes greatly
to the sublime. There is a sense of the overwhelming in its grandeur and
infiniteness as compared to man who is small. It acts as a refuge by diminishing
man’s problems, but it can accentuate them also because it is threatening
and uncontrollable. Victor’s escapade to Montanvert filled him with ‘sublime
ecstasy that gave wings to the soul, and allowed it to soar…’ (94) The
mountains are ‘terrifically desolate’ yet possessing a ‘solitary grandeur.’(94)
Such a beautiful landscape becomes almost paradoxical as it would witness
Walton’s and Victor’s suffering travels across the frozen seas, and its
attractive-repulsion parallels the nature of the construction of the monster
as well-attractive, dangerous and uncontrollable.
Beauty is brought to perfection in women, who are likened to angels and
the Virgin Mary .They usually fit within moral and domestic conventions,
like Frankenstein’s Elizabeth and Dracula’s Mina. However, sensation and
shock tactics are created by defiling such women, and bringing to light
the ideological suppression of women in society. Beauty without morals
or chastity becomes unnatural and bestial, evoking attraction and repulsion.
Beauty here is seen as something to be feared due to its power to seduce
and bring out the irrational in man. Lucy possesses two faces of beauty
within herself, the seductive and cold beauty when she is a blood sucking
vampire and the earthly and peaceful one when she is truly dead as a virtuous
woman. Similarly, Ollala’s beauty is that of degeneration, like the house,
and is an indication of illness, insanity or bestiality.
(Candida Ho, 2004)
Birth
Birth evolves in gothic literature as an overdetermined symbol stemming
from man’s darkest desires to overreach the boundaries of knowledge. A
distortion of the natural act of human creation, the emphasis on its agonized,
painful labour process functions as a perversion of nature in giving birth
to all that is monstrous in human nature outside the safety of the domestic
sphere. The arduous process of animating life in Frankenstein and Jekyll
and Hyde manifests itself in the deformed birth-child that results: which
Frankenstein condemns as “a filthy creation… [a] daemoniacal corpse to
which I had so miserably given life” (56).
The trope of a deformed, perverted birth also has
Biblical echoes, most evident in the demonic trinity of Milton’s Paradise
Lost, in which Sin is taken from Satan’s head and the incestuous son of
their union is torn out of her bowels. This is alluded to in the reference
to Hyde as a “child of Hell”, spawned from a division of evil that tears
away the darker desires embedded in his creator’s nature. It also resonates
with the birth of the gothic novel, as the creation of its authors’ restless
imaginations and underlying desires in a repressive society. Newfound impulses
to conquer science and control creation can also be read as the challenging
of authority, manifested in the birth of a rebellious self contesting religious
and social orthodoxy. The birth of the monster in Frankenstein thus becomes
a metaphor for the threatening figure of a working-class Everyman, who
is nevertheless a product of bourgeois authority as much as its enemy.
Birth also becomes enmeshed with larger societal
anxieties stemming from Malthus’s treaty on population explosion, in the
Victorian fear that racial (and social) Others would reproduce aggressively
to threaten the existing power structure, and taint racial purity. This
is mirrored by Frankenstein’s fear that the monster would reproduce. Ultimately,
the distorted birth process that haunts the gothic narrative is checked
by the monstrous creation it releases: a mirror to the darkest aspects
of its creator.
Works cited:
Milton, John. Paradise Lost. Ed. Gordon Teskey. 3rd ed. (New York;
London: W. W. Norton, 2005).
Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein (London: Penguin Books, 1994).
Stevenson, Robert Louis. The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde
(London: Penguin Books, 1994).
(Niroshi Sadanandan, 2006)
Blood
Blood, fundamentally used in horror literature as a gag factor and ghastly
presentation of gore and carnage, plays a far more important and symbolic
role in the arena of Gothic literature. It spans a spectrum of socio-cultural
associations and connotations that is most aptly exemplified in Bram Stoker’s
Dracula where the legend of the vampire comes alive to plague modern Londoners
and deprive them of their life-blood and hence with it, all that blood
implies in Gothic literature. The theme of blood is present too, though
perhaps in a less obvious fashion in many other Gothic novels though its
delivery is far less overt in the ones that are bereft of vampiric associations.
Due to the inextricable links between the Gothic tradition, the Church
and Christian doctrine, blood naturally represents life in most of Gothic
literature, for “the blood is the life”. Lucy slowly grows more lifeless
and more like the undead when Dracula starts to feed on her and Mina suffers
exactly same consequence, growing paler each day as she is deprived of
her life blood. Just as life is drawn out by the simultaneous vampiric
sucking of the blood, Lucy grows healthier and more alive as she is given
blood transfusions from Quincy, Arthur, Seward and Van Helsing. More examples
of the links between blood and bodily functions reside in Frankenstein
where Victor learns constantly that the blood that runs within one’s veins
is the very foundation of life itself. The Creature that he creates declares
vengeance by demanding satiation through the “blood of [his] remaining
friends” (95).
Blood and especially the transference of blood are also connotative of
sexual intercourse and sacrifice. Arthur regards himself as married to
Lucy even without a proper ceremony because his blood is within her body,
unaware of course that Quincy and Seward had also given her a blood transfusion.
The transference calls to mind a kind of exchange of bodily fluids and
penetration, a loss of one’s own essence and the gain of another’s that
is very symbolic of sexual intercourse. In this way blood is also linked
to identity, as the consumption of another’s blood makes one part of the
other, establishing a link, and for lack of a better term, blood bond.
Mina’s sucking of Dracula’s blood makes her less human and more vampiric
and Lucy’s taking of Dracula’s blood ultimately transforms her into a vampire
as well.
The importance of blood is hardly contested, but equally important is the
great fear of its loss. This fear of the loss of blood itself translates
into many inherent Gothic anxieties such as xenophobia, fear of sexuality,
fear of the Other, fear of death and mortality etc. Immense loss of blood
will inevitably herald death; blood infusion from another will threaten
and possibly subordinate ones down identity, especially if the blood is
from a foreigner. Fear of giving blood indicates unwillingness to sacrifice,
and fear of sexuality which is indicative of impotence or lack of sexual
prowess. In both Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and Frankenstein, and needless
to say many other Gothic novels, the expression of blood running cold in
one’s veins is a definite signal of fear and dread. Having the blood of
a person on one’s hands is also a signal of guilt, most likely because
having deprived someone of his/her life-blood, one has effectively killed
the person.
Selected Bibliography
Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein. Great Britain: Pan Books, 1994.
(Adeline Hoe, 2004).
Gothic
BLOOD: Desiring the RED
The significance of blood in gothic literature can be illustrated in many
aspects. At the elementary level, blood denotes genealogy, lineages and
procreation. This denotation has historical significance for the gothic
text to either construct or recall its origins. Extending genealogy to
the family, what we often associate as ‘blood is thicker than water’ is
challenged in the gothic texts like Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Robert
Louis Stevenson’s Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde that foreground certain anxieties
within the family structure such as in the relationships between fathers
and sons, husbands and wives.
What we know as ‘blue blood’ reminds us at once of the aristocracy and
nobility. The gothic texts in the Victorian era were concerned with the
rise of the bourgeois class, a liminal force itself that threatened to
destabilise the ruling power of the former elite. Therefore, the gothic
treatment of blood sometimes focuses on the purity and tainted ness of
blood like in Bram Stoker’s Dracula to highlight then contemporary societal
anxieties.
Blood, due to its ability to be transfused between humans, can be treated
as a transactional currency in the gothic text as exemplified in Stoker’s
Dracula. This co-modification of blood is highly significant as it reflects
the anxiety of the genre towards increasing dominion of capitalism and
industrialisation especially in the 19th century that threatened traditional
ways of life.
Blood in the gothic text can too connote sexuality and the libido. In Dracula,
Dracula and his thirst for blood highlight a libidinous nature that arises
from his ‘eastern’ hence different origins. Blood has the further implications
of gender and race as despite its physical omnipresence between genders
and across races, the perceptions of blood cannot but be influenced by
perceptions of race and gender.
The ambivalence of blood’s dual functionality as a life-giver and yet also
a life-denier highlights the liminal space that blood occupies in the gothic
genre. Stoker’s Dracula is the epitome of a character who both denies and
yet gives ‘life’ to his victims. The ‘liminality’ of blood, along with
other gothic motifs such as the dual-door house in Stevenson’s Dr Jekyll
and Mr Hyde and Victor’s ambivalent monster in Frankenstein who is both
inhumane yet humane are all characteristic of the genre.
The notion of blood as a life-giver is further extended by the religious
connotations of blood itself. The blood of Biblical Christ who had sacrificed
himself on the cross for mankind’s salvation had been subverted in Stoker’s
Dracula when Dracula, now possibly perceived as the Anti-Christ who consumes
his victim’s blood instead of giving blood for salvation.
Without doubt, we need the bloody key to open the door to the gothic world.
(James Tan, 2004)
Boundaries
Anne Williams in her book The Art of Darkness: A Poetics of Gothic
suggests that Gothic literature is “pervasively organized around anxieties
about boundaries (and boundary transgressions)” (Williams 16). Gothic literature,
however, deals not only with boundaries (and transgressions) of “self and
other”; it attempts also to show the problematic nature of boundaries in
the first place. Social boundaries, for example, define what is correct,
but at the same time repress the individual. Boundaries in Gothic fiction
are often blurred, and things are never as clearly defined as they seem.
The establishment of the boundary between the self
and other is important in Gothic fiction for everything that the Self is
not is projected onto the Other. In Shelley’s Frankenstein, Frankenstein’s
monster is clearly the Other for he, at least physically, has come to represent
everything that the other normal looking characters are not. The idea of
“self and other” extends also to geographical boundaries, where everything
within the boundary of civilized world is good and everything beyond it
is either seen as exotic or dangerous. In Stoker’s Dracula, London is seen
as civilized and safe (at least prior the arrival of Dracula) and everything
in Romania is considered to be dark, ominous and dangerous.
Boundaries create distinction, but they are also
repressive in nature. Society lays down certain norms (boundaries) that
individuals cannot transgress or risk being termed the ‘Other’. People
in attempting to stay within these boundaries naturally have to repress
any desires that may transgress these socially placed boundaries. It can
be argued that Dr. Jekyll’s creation Mr. Hyde is an attempt to remain respectable
at all times, as defined by the societal boundaries.
Lastly, boundaries can be blurred as we see in Dr
Jekyll and Mr Hyde, for is it really possible to create a boundary within
oneself? The fact the Jekyll goes to bed as himself and wakes up as Hyde
suggests that not only are boundaries problematic, it can also be easily
blurred. Dracula too, represents a blurring of the boundaries between the
living and the dead, He is not dead, but he is not alive as well, hence
he is called the “Un-Dead”, which is really an oxymoron.
Boundaries are endless in Gothic fiction; they constantly
attempt to define what is correct, known and approved, but at the same
time create more problems by their very act of categorization.
(Ivan Ang, 2006)
The Gothic City
The city emerged as a threatening social space in nineteenth-century
Britain, particularly in the century’s latter half, when urbanization saw
the majority of the population moving into the cities. Urban gothic literature
reflects the anxieties of urbanization by representing the relationship
of the individual to the city.
The gothic city is a nightmarish space which threatens one’s sense
of self. It is replete with the problems of urbanity: rising crime, declining
morality and the blurring of social boundaries. The city’s architecture
is monstrous and inherently paradoxical: it is constructed by man, and
yet its labyrinthine alleys remain unknowable, thus giving rise to the
uncanny. This is compounded by the city’s ruins which symbolize moral decay;
while the city is organic and constantly growing, the architectural ruins
shadow it with a sense of death. The gothic city is thus causative and
symbolic of the threats to the individual and his alienation in an urban
setting. This leads to the loss of identity, as dramatized in Stevenson’s
The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886), where Jekyll’s split
identity indicates a fragmented sense of self.
The city is also a space of evil. This is unlike earlier Gothic writing
like The Castle of Otranto (1764) where evil was displaced to foreign locales
like Italy. In contrast, the vampire’s invasion of urban London in Bram
Stoker’s Dracula (1897) literally brings the horror “home”. The city is
used to confront the individual with the idea that evil is not externalized
elsewhere, but rather literally exists within.
(Erin Woodford, 2006)
Death
Gothic literature
is obsessed with death. We find portents of death, unnatural deaths, and
series of deaths (e.g. Frankenstein), all of which contribute to an atmosphere
of horror. Death in Gothic literature is associated with the supernatural.
If Gothic literature reflects a wish to overcome one’s mortality, there
is also a fear of those who somehow manage to transcend it e.g. She, vampires,
Frankenstein’s monster.
In Gothic literature,
death is horrific because it is often not quite the end. This thwarts the
human wish for certainty. The vampires who are Undead occupy a liminal
space; they are at once both alive and dead. The vampire hunters in Dracula
have to drive a stake into them, to make sure they are really dead. There
is also the trope of the dead who return e.g. Poe’s “Ligeia”. These kinds
of spectres can also be seen as manifestations of the return of the repressed.
Likewise, the
subject of death itself has often been ignored or repressed. It is what
is unknown, and poses a threat to the Victorian mind which desires order.
The Gothic is interested in what has been glossed over. We don’t really
get sentimental scenes like the death of little William in East Lynne;
rather, the more gruesome, inexplicable aspects of death are explored.
The corporeality of the body is emphasised with gory descriptions of blood
and grave worms. Reading about death serves as a reminder of one’s mortality.
There is also
a Gothic obsession with the bodies of dead women. Poe said that the death
of a beautiful woman is “the most poetical topic in the world”. For a discussion
on death, femininity and the aesthetic, see Elizabeth Bronfen’s book Over
her Dead Body. She suggests that Gothic writing itself may be an act of
killing off the female as it transmits the animate body into inanimate
text. Necrophiliac desire for the dead woman e.g. Heathcliff’s digging
of Catherine’s grave, also points to other kinds of transgressions e.g.
incest.
(Khoo Lilin, 2004)
Deformity
The Oxford English Dictionary defines “deformity” as “the quality or
condition of being misshapen, or marred in appearance”, where the word
connotes moral disfigurement. On top of that, the Latin form of “deform”,
its root word, also implies disgracefulness.
Deformity is abundant in the gothic, especially
as monstrosity, ugliness and moral disfigurement. In a romantic gothic
novel like Frankenstein, the monster embodies deformity with its hideousness
where its misshapen form results from an integration of body parts from
different corpses. Besides, the narrative is an amalgamation of different
textual elements from sources like the bible and The Ancient Mariner among
many others, which are distorted.
On the other hand, in a fin de siêcle gothic
novel like Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, deformity is present in the atavistic
and ugly appearance of Hyde, whereas there is suggestion of moral disfigurement
in all the characters, including professionals like Utterson, who was wandering
on the streets in the “small hours” (25). Besides, the narrator who conceals,
and the society that is so secretive, where Hyde (homonymic for “hide”
though also having other implications like “Hyde Park” etc) embodies that
secrecy, highlights how the gothic aims to uncover the disguise for deformity
or disgracefulness in society.
Through deformity, the gothic novel interrogates
society and its failure to recognise its inherent short-comings, as can
be seen by how the monster and Hyde are foils for many other characters
in their respective novels, so as to bring about a greater level of self-reflexivity
in a world where all negative aspects are projected unto the “Other”.
(Pang Shi Hua, 2006)
DISLOCATION
“Dislocation”
is the destabilising effect caused by fundamentally unstable and cryptic
gothic narratives in its fragmentary epistolary forms such as “Frankenstein”
where letters from the no man’s land of the Arctic may never reach Margaret,
or in the heteroglossic narration of “Dracula” which is made up of curiously
collated newspaper reports, unopened letters and supposedly private journals.
The avoidance of a neat arranging of elements and reassuring endings in
gothic narratives leads to the desired dislocation of perspectives and
ultimately the disturbance of a smooth reading experience as perhaps part
of gothic narrative’s agenda to challenge assumptions of normalcy in the
linear narration and neat resolution of social realist novels. This destabilizing
reading experience can be aided by the technique of either the lack of
omniscient narrators in both “Frankenstein” and “Dracula” as an objective
and cohesive voice pulling together the different articles with its comments
or by problematizing the omniscient voice in “Jekyll and Hyde” that frustrates
the reader in its deliberate effacement at times.
The abstraction
of the gothic narrative form often parallels the story’s concerns and anxieties
when confronting gothic themes which are notorious for its inability to
pin down a stable center of meaning hence also resulting in the pathological
effect of dislocation. This is exemplified in the split into “self” and
“other” when societal demands are unable to be reconciled with individual
impulses especially in the urban gothic tale of “Jekyll and Hyde”. However
when the boundaries of self/other collapses as when it gets progressively
difficult to control the figure of the “Other”/ Hyde, so does it become
even more impossible to locate stable identities. The collapse of any single,
firm definition is also manifested in gothic fiction’s use of overdetermined
symbols such as “blood” in “Dracula” which furthers the notion of the genre’s
multiplicity. It may be impossible to fix gothic fiction with a stable
meaning however one might say that the dislocation of the reader from a
fixed vantage point paradoxically jars one into a greater critical engagement
with all elements of the text.
(Belinda Loh Mei
Lin, 2004)
Doppelgänger
Translated from German as “Double-goer”
Originating from Johann Paul Friedrich Richter’s story Siebenkas, the doppelgänger
motif was vaguely explained by Richter in German as “so heissen sie Leute
die sie selbst sehen,” translating into “So people who sees themselves
are called”. The term describes a duality of the self in which a shadow,
or an alter-ego, manifests itself to the original subject, and the subject
has a simultaneous consciousness of being both his present self and the
external other observing himself. Horror is produced at the recognition
of seeing oneself from an external position, in the realization that a
tragic figure that the subject has been observing is actually that of his
own. The projection of fear and anxiety to an external agent returns to
haunt the subject in this fashion, as exemplified by Heinrich Heine’s poem
taking the term as its title:
A man stands here too, staring up into space
And wrings his hands with the strength of his pain
It chills me, when I behold his pale face
For the moon shows me my own features again!
This horror is also heightened by the sense of uncanny or the ‘Unheimlich’
that Freud interpreted in his theory of the ‘Uncanny’ as aspects of things
familiar to us which becomes distorted and are made strange. Dread is intensified
as a result of discovering a familiarity to that what was feared, the subject
realizing that the fear was inherently innate in his psychology. Citing
the example of ETA Hoffmann’s story The Sandman, the fear Nathaniel bears
for the Coppelius the Sandman as a threatening figure is reawakened by
a doubling of this evil with the appearance of Coppola the glass-maker.
In other
literary instances, the doppelgänger motif brings about the fear of
identity theft with the startling appearance of an identical other who
has subversive or malicious intentions. In Wilkie Collin’s Woman in White,
Laura Fairlie’s had her identity exchanged by her double Anne Catherick
upon the latter’s death, resulting in her incarceration in the asylum when
her real upper-class identity being misappropriated. With The Strange Case
of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, the double comes from a division of the self,
the two egos representing opposing figures of a good-evil dichotomy. Here,
the respectable Dr Jekyll slowly loses his sense of self-identity with
the severing of his psyche into two disparate halves, and Mr Hyde conversely
beginning to take over the Dr Jekyll’s life.
Under a doubled association, literary characters can encounter or mirror
an opposite figure in significant actions, with the parallel motion of
the two usually indicating an implicit similarity and inescapable relationship
between the two. Despite being two characters opposing each other in Dracula,
Van Helsing and Dracula bears similar traits of being foreign and authoritative
father-figures to the other characters, their identification asserting
the same inherent desire for power and control.
The literary Gothic’s interest in the doppelgänger highlights the
period’s interest in the exploration of the psychopathological nature of
man, in its scientific search for the basis of fear and dread in the psyche.
The notion of a unified and stable psychology of the self is destabilized
when the unconscious overcomes the ego in responding to primitive fears
of identity loss and disembodiment of the soul from the body. An element
of the uncanny and the macabre is thus presented in gothic texts where
the doppelgänger appears, by blurring of the boundaries between the
dream state and reality, sanity and madness, introducing subjectivity into
what we perceive the external world really is.
(Ong Yong Hui,
2004)
Gothic
Doubling
Doubling refers to a multiplication by two, such as when two or more characters
parallel each other in action or personality, for example. It can also
mean internal doubling, or division within the self to exhibit a duality
of character.
Often, seemingly disparate characters are shown through doubling to be
fundamentally similar, hence collapsing the self-other dichotomy and imparting
a worrying sense of indistinguishableness between the supposed opposites.
This implies that boundaries between deliberately demarcated groups of
people are actually slippery and unstable. External identity markers such
as dressing and mannerisms are hence undependable, allowing social categories
to become permeable and vulnerable to transgression by virtue of their
easy imitation.
Doubling hence illustrates deep anxieties that Victorian elites had regarding
the weakening of the distinctions drawn along lines of class, gender, race
and nationality, posing threats to the interests of the self. It also raises
a cautionary point that a thin line separates good and evil, and while
it is easy for evil to infiltrate one’s protected sanctum, it is equally
easy for one to fall into the latter’s trappings. As such, everything that
seems good must also be held in suspicion of harboring a negative underside.
Doubling also foregrounds the motif of mirroring, in particular the projection
of one’s fears, desires and anxieties onto the other, which becomes an
uncomfortable reflection of ugly traits that the self refuses to acknowledge.
The other thus reveals the social ills and moral decay that high Victorian
society tries to ignore. It also broaches the notion that there are always
two sides to a coin, such as that crime and poverty would necessarily accompany
wealth accumulation in a capitalistic society. Progress for some comes
at the cost of hardship for many others.
At the individual level, doubling plays out an internal splitting of the
self between the public face of high Victorian respectability and professionalism,
versus the carefully hidden face of despicability and immorality. It makes
an oblique reference to Victorian hypocrisy, duplicity of standards and
multiplicity of facades, as well as the fear of being discovered as such.
It also dramatizes the inner struggle and vacillation between choices of
good and evil in the individual. It is also interesting to note that for
particular groups, doubling shows the essential sameness of perception
by society of their status. Gothic representations of female characters
for example, almost always seem to double each other in their stereotypical
portrayal of feminine passivity when confronted with masculine power.
Lastly, at the narrative level, the form and structure of gothic writings
sometimes act as a double to the content of the novel, underscoring the
importance of themes that are doubled (reiterated through form and content),
and the narrative strategy of doubling itself.
(Diana Chan Tsui
Li, 2004)
Gothic
Doubling
The concept of
doubling in Gothic literature proves significantly revealing in the interrogation
of the established social norms of the Victorian society in the 19th century.
Relevant and applicable at both the individual and societal levels, Gothic
“doubling” in itself suggests an implicit lack of oneness, thereby plainly
suggesting an inherent instability or uncertainty found within the characters
and their environments in the Gothic novel. This concept manifests
as readers recognise the implied and inherent similarities between even
seeming polar opposites, for example between the civilised and the savage,
good and evil, creator and created etc, the degree of horror, so characteristic
of Gothic novels, is heightened.
The massive social
change and flux during the Victorian Gothic period made this destabilising
Gothic notion of “doubling” particularly significant. Indeterminacy and
uncertainty arose from core societal problems as socio-economic forces
took shape to change living and working conditions. For example, the rise
of the working class generated anxieties about uncontrolled reproduction
and the blurring of class boundaries. Socio-economic and cultural tensions
were exacerbated by other concerns such as the growing interest in travel
(thereby inducing a threat to England’s cultural imperialism), as well
as the rise of capitalism that created fears of displacement and class
exploitation.
In its interrogation
of accepted social conventions, the concept of “doubling” functions as
a tool through which a mirroring of society’s problems reflect and reveal
deep-seated insecurities of the Victorian era. Amongst other concerns was
that of the bipolar dichotomy between Self and Other, which is associated
with fear and disdain of the racial or foreign Other-- so attributed with
corruption and decadence and perceived as seeking to undermine England’s
cultural superiority. Yet, this issue was inextricably bound to the perception
of a declining English aristocracy that had been upstaged by changing social
forces and was no longer able to hold its own in a rapidly changing society
in the midst of a profound transition. This becomes a common trope in Gothic
novels such as Sheridan Le Fanu’s Uncle Silas and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein,
where figures such as Madame de la Rougierre and the Monster as foreign
Others pose a threat to the now declining and impotent aristocratic class
of the Frankensteins and the Ruthyns by disrupting their family peace and
honour. Within the study and categorisation of the Othered figures then
lay the answers to Victorian societal weaknesses.
Thus, that which
might be assumed to be orthodox and accepted in society is subverted within
Gothic literature through “doubling”. By showing different characters that
demonstrate frighteningly similar actions and character traits, e.g. Dracula
and Van Helsing, both of whom can be read as intruders of domestic peace
and sanctity, or different environments that are nonetheless reflective
of the same social stratification problem, e.g. the prestigious grounds
of Knowl and the dilapidated estate of Bartram Haugh, the loopholes and
anxieties of Victorian society are shown up in the mirroring of “doubled”
actions and characterisations.
(Joanne Raj, 2004)
The
Doppelganger in the Gothic
In Irish folklore the doppelganger is also known as a fetch, but translated
from its original German, it literally means ‘double’ (doppel) ‘walker’
(ganger). In the literary vernacular, it has come to refer to the double
of a person, usually in relation to great evil. Most Gothic narratives
portray the doppelganger to be mischievous and malicious. In science fiction
and fantasy narratives, they appear as shapeshifters who mimic a particular
person or species to serve their own evil purposes.
In a Gothic text, the appearance of the doppelganger possesses great significance
because of its cultural codifications of being an alter ego or antithetical
character to the literary protagonist – an evil twin, so to speak. Though
the ‘twin effect’ of the doppelganger suggests physical features identical
to that of the self, this is not always the case, as in Robert Louis Stevenson’s
Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, where Jekyll in the misguided dream of splitting
the self into its good and evil halves to remove the evil nature of humans,
creates Hyde – Jekyll’s doppelganger in personality, though physically
contrary in appearance. Where Jekyll is “a large, well made, smooth-faced
man… with every mark capacity and kindness”, Hyde is “pale and dwarfish,
he gave an impression of deformity without any nameable malformation, he
had a displeasing smile”, and Mr Utterson even describes him as “troglodytic”.
As Jekyll himself writes, “even as good shone upon the countenance of the
one, evil was written broadly and plainly on the face of the other.”
As the spiritual or ghostly counterpart of a living person, the doppelganger
is a shadow of the self that accompanies every human. Hyde is Jekyll’s
‘shadow’, a personification of the repressed evil nature that all humans
possess. Generally, doppelgangers are visible only to their owners; symbolically,
this means that only its owner can see it for what it truly is – and characteristic
of this, only Jekyll knows Hyde’s true identity. They cast no shadow or
reflection in a mirror or water (when Jekyll is Jekyll, he sees only Jekyll
and not Hyde) and are also supposed to provide advice to the person they
shadow, but this advice could be misleading or malicious (Hyde constantly
tempts Jekyll to drink the potion that will lead to the metamorphosis).
In rare instances, they could also plant false ideas in a person’s mind
or appear before friends and relatives, causing confusion (Hyde appears
before Jekyll’s friends and pass himself off as Jekyll when he signs cheques).
Another aspect of the doppelganger theme is that if the doppelganger and
the self were to meet, they would both die (the conflict between Jekyll
and Hyde eventually destroys them both because the individual is unable
to co-exist with his doppelganger).
Doppelgangers can therefore be said to be extracts of what is undesirable
in humans and society. As such they are antithetical evil twins who threaten
to undermine and take over society if left unchecked and uncontrolled –
projections of all that is evil in the nature of humans. Hyde is a personification
of all that is evil in human nature – violent, cruel, voluptuous in desires,
and as a result, is the doppelganger not only of Jekyll but of society.
(Melissa Chew,
2004)
Doppelgänger
This word is derived from German. ‘Doppel’ means ‘double’ and ‘gänger’
literally means ‘goer’. The Doppelgänger is a supernatural figure
that doubles living people. In some ghost stories, the Doppelgänger
would appear beside a person and imitate everything that person is doing.
There are also tales where a Doppelgänger is shown to be a projection
from the future warning one of an evil that is about to befall one.
In Gothic literature, the Doppelgänger becomes very significant. Frequently,
it is the projection of the suppressed self, possibly the id in psychoanalytical
theory. It becomes a representation of that which is usually kept hidden,
but is now revealed. The Doppelgänger hence becomes the alter ego.
Therefore, we could say that Hyde was Dr Jekyll’s Doppelgänger, as
he represents the personification of what Dr Jekyll had to suppress within
himself to survive in the hypocrisy of Victorian society. Likewise, the
monster is Frankenstein’s Doppelgänger as it represents Frankenstein’s
desire to overcome death.
The Doppelgänger gives us the eerie feeling of looking into a mirror
and seeing a place where all is reversed. Likewise in Gothic novels, events
occur in a paralleling manner, both to create an aesthetic of confusion
and multiplicity, as well as to mirror that which is happening in society
but is swept under the carpet for the sake of decorum. Hence in the novel
‘Dracula’ by Bram Stoker, Dracula and Van Helsing, in a strange way, appear
to be each other’s Doppelgänger, as they have striking similarities
in spite of being placed in opposite poles.
(Nandabalan Panneerselvam,
2004)
Dreams
Literally, dreams refer to the images that form in an individual’s
mind when he or she is asleep. Figuratively however, dreams signify the
inner most, repressed desires of an individual. Dreams can reveal the sexual
desires of an individual bound by the rules in society. For example, in
Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Jonathan, finding himself in a dream-like state
and surrounded by three attractive women, confesses that he feels
a “wicked, burning desire” to be kissed by these women. While reality is
such that Victorian society demands that he keeps his passions restrained,
his dream involving the women, reflects his desire to transgress such societal
rules. Meanwhile, for Lucy, it is in her unconscious, sleepwalking state
that she meets Dracula. We can consider Lucy’s “rendezvous” with the Count
as her secret desire to break away from the constraints of Victorian society.
In doing so, she has the freedom to romance a man who is not even among
her three existing suitors. Dreams can also mirror one’s fears. In Frankenstein,
Victor dreams of Elizabeth, whose lips “became livid with the hue of death”
and who then transforms into his mother’s corpse. This dream perhaps, points
out the secret, subconscious repulsion that Victor has towards Elizabeth,
or his longing for his dead mother, or both. Dreams also strangely foreshadow
events to come. We see this later when the three vampires seduce Van Helsing,
just like how they seduced Jonathan, and also when Elizabeth literally
dies on her wedding night.
(Anna Mathew, 2006)
Entrapment
Entrapment, a favourite horror device of the Gothic, means to be confined
or to be trapped in such a way that there is no way out. It is this sense
of there being no escape that contributes to the claustrophobic psychology
of Gothic space. The notion of claustrophobia is closely tied up with that
of entrapment. Although it is most often regarded as a consequence of physical
entrapment, it can also be more generally attributed to a character’s sense
of helplessness, or a feeling that one is caught up in some sinister plan
or destiny over which one has no control.
There are essentially three types of entrapment: physical, mental, and
existential. Physical entrapment would mean being physically trapped in
some place. A recurring gothic device of physical entrapment is that of
the protagonist trapped in a maze of some kind and trying to escape, but
inevitably returning to the same spot again and again. An example of physical
entrapment can be found in Stoker’s Dracula. When Harker is being driven
to the castle of Dracula, he experiences a moment of being physically trapped
in the nightmare landscape of the Transylvania, as is evident in his remark
that “[it] seemed to me that we were simply going over and over the same
ground again; and so I took note of some salient point, and found that
this was so” (Stoker). Another example of such entrapment is found in Smith’s
A Rendezvous in Averiogne. In this short story, the protagonist Gerard
is trying in vain to escape from a forest; he returns, inevitably, to the
same spot every time. Eventually, “[his] very will was benumbed, was crushed
down as by the incumbence of a superior volition” (Smith).
Mental entrapment, on the other hand, is about being confined to a certain
state of mind. The gothic trope of madness, for example, is a form of mental
entrapment. In a way, the insane are trapped in their own mental universe,
into which no one else can penetrate. Renfield, in Dracula, is doubly entrapped;
physically locked up in an asylum, he is also limited to the confines of
his mental universe, doomed to be continually misunderstood by Seward,
or simply dismissed as insane.
Lastly, there is also existential entrapment, which takes the form of social
entropy and ontological or epistemological entrapment. An example of existential
entrapment can be found in Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and
Mr Hyde; Dr Jekyll feels trapped by societal notions of respectability,
by a constant pressure of having to uphold his reputation as a gentleman
in the eyes of the Victorian public. As a way of breaking out of this ‘prison’,
Dr Jekyll invents the figure of Hyde. Hyde is therefore Jekyll’s liberator,
for it is as Hyde that Dr Jekyll can truly express himself, unbound by
considerations of maintaining his respectability.
(Esther Leong,
2004)
Entrapment
The notion of
entrapment is a prevalent motif in gothic literature. There are two main
types of entrapment which can be observed in such works: physical and psychological
entrapment of the character(s).
Physical entrapment occurs when a character’s body is constrained within
a particular physical setting and he is unable to get himself out of that
setting. Such is the case when Frankenstein’s monster is entrapped in a
body which Frankenstein had created for him.
Psychological entrapment is manifested in the form of inescapable, agonizing
tensions within a character’s mind. For example, Frankenstein is psychologically
entrapped when he has to make a decision either to create a female monster
or risk his family being murdered by his original monster.
The entrapment of characters in gothic literature mirrors the entrapment
faced by individuals in the Victorian society. These individuals were entrapped
because they were forced to repress certain desires that they had, for
example, sexual desires, in order to observe strict Victorian social decorum
and rules and work towards an ordered society.
Besides being entrapped in such an oppressive society, the Victorians may
have also found themselves entrapped in a rapidly changing world. With
the onset of urbanization, the Industrial Revolution and the Financial
Revolution, they might have felt entrapped as they were unable to escape
the resulting changes that were taking place.
On another level, the readers of gothic literature might feel a sense of
entrapment too because they are forced to accept the typical presence of
the uncanny, the supernatural, and other unfamiliar elements coupled with
secrecy and the withholding of certain facts in the literature. For instance,
when one reads The Strange Case of Dr.Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, one might feel
entrapped when the story does not reveal facts such as the identity of
the omniscient narrator or the real reason for Hyde murdering Sir Danvers
Carew.
(Claudine Fernandez,
2006)
(The Economical)
Family
Industrial development
in the Nineteenth century encouraged urbanization and by 1850 more than
half of England lived in cities and worked in industries. This changing
economic condition inevitably challenged conventional ideology of the family
which became redefined to include members “whether actually living together
or not” and “connected by (either) blood or affinity” (OED).
By this definition, the patriarchal figure became freed from monogamy.
Dracula, as symbol of the new money-obsessed class, had three vampire wives.
Similarly, with ready money, many figures of authority were in command
of the imp-child. Instead of a genealogical right, the new capitalist society
allows wealth to gain patriarchal authority over many.
While the new factory communities introduced new figures of authority,
with respect to cloth and steel, production becomes increasingly specifically
gendered. Through personifying industrial production, Gothic tropes seem
to suggest via Frankenstein and Dracula that while possible, the resultant
single-parent offspring are unnatural and terrifying.
At the same time, economically active working class women and the ‘masculine’
New Woman threatened conventional notions of feminine dependency. Writers
like Stevenson reacted by only presenting negative working women (in both
sense of the word) while Stoker singles intellectual Mina out for Dracula’s
sanction.
Proliferation of child labor positioned children as ‘property generating
property’ as exemplified in The Bottle Imp. Dracula’s brute beast children
also aid his creation of vampire children. The horror of the four female
vampires’ feeding off children is an implicit gothic comment on the inhumane
nature of this exploitation.
Resources:
Oxford English
Dictionary. http://oed.com.libproxy1.nus.edu.sg/
Emayzine.com.
http://www.emayzine.com/lectures/indust~2.htm
(Yao Lingyun,
2006)
Female Sexuality
Aspects of female
sexuality figure prominently in gothic literature insofar as there is a
strong preoccupation with what may happen if female sexuality is not contained
within the structures of patriarchal authority across many Gothic texts.
The highly disturbing image of Lucy the “Un-Dead” throwing the child whom
she was cradling in her arms earlier on onto the hard ground without so
much as a blink in the eye in Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) encapsulates
one example of such a preoccupation—that of motherhood gone wrong. The
mother-child relationship—one that is usually regarded as nurturing and
loving—is violently destabilized at this instance where Lucy—as the symbolic
mother—harms the child whom she was supposed to be protecting. Relating
to motherhood, the theme of birth signals the preoccupation with the unknownable
dimensions of female sexuality that many Gothic texts exhibit. In Mary
Shelley’s Frankenstein (1831), the birth of Victor Frankenstein’s creation
is depicted as one that is monstrous insofar as it is “unnatural”; Frankenstein
is, symbolically, both father and mother to the creation that he abhors
from the moment of its birth. Given that it was a woman who authored Frankenstein,
this then signals how female sexuality—in all its different aspects—was
very much on the minds of both men and women in Victorian Britain. When
seen alongside the socio-cultural-historical developments in Victorian
Britain, it becomes possible then to view the depictions of female sexuality
in gothic literature as responses to women’s increasing freedom and mobility
during this period; Mina Harker in Dracula, for instance, is very much
a response to the New Woman phenomenon.
(Ashley Lin, 2006)
Fin-de-Siecle
Gothic
Literally
meaning “end of century”, fin-de-siecle gothic refers specifically to the
gothic literature of the last two to three decades of the 19th century.
There is a pervading sense of instability and unease, such that it was
felt an age was coming to an end and things would change, not necessarily
for the better. This is reflected by the idea of human devolution, seen
in Stevenson’s Olalla, where we are able to see the full effects of the
devoluted foreign family in the figure of the mother and brother. In Stevenson’s
Jekyll and Hyde, it is made worse because the upper-crust Dr. Jekyll transforms
himself into the degenerate Hyde. This choice, however, is gradually taken
away from him, and he loses control so that he becomes involuntarily trapped
in the form (and personality) of Hyde.
Something else
we may see in this is the idea of destabilizing loss of control, not only
in the personal sphere, but also in terms of the imperial empire and its
inability to ultimately control the Hyde-like natives. The fatalistic sense
that the civilised Jekyll would be subsumed by Hyde, taken in this colonial
context, suggested a strong belief that Jekyll would have done better not
to indulge in Hyde, but should have remained with the civilised elite who
were his friends.
Anxieties about
the city and its future are also a feature, in the recurring image of a
threatening cityscape that is always possessed of a dark underside capable
of hiding characters like Stoker’s Dracula and Stevenson’s Hyde. The foreign
threat appears in Dracula, who not only threatens the loss of life, and
civilised living but also the women, so that the very future of the city
is one of parasitical creatures who are sired by a foreign menace. The
twofold threat here is thus not only that of diluting racial bloodlines,
but also of losing the culture of this city to the lesser foreign type.
(Kimberly Chaw
Lock Wai, 2004)
Gothic Fog
An important element of the narrative and thematic landscapes across
gothic literature is the recurring appearance of the fog. The fog is prominently
invoked across the multiple Gothic ‘types’, which vary from the ‘Old Gothic’,
of which the novels of Horace Walpole are an example; the ‘new Gothic’,
as exemplified by works like Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein; the ‘fin-de-siecle
Gothic’ in the detective fiction of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle; to the ‘modernist
Gothic’ aesthetics of T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land. The fog, very generally,
serves two primary functions in gothic fiction. The first of these would
be its use as a formal property of or device within the narrative. Since
the fog is a naturally occurring phenomenon which may be neither contained
nor controlled, it becomes an effectively ambiguous or sometimes ambivalent
(it is exterior to law and morality) means for abetting or protracting
plotlines. In Conan Doyle’s The Hound of the Baskervilles for instance,
it aids the criminal’s escape, yet at the same time becomes ultimately
responsible for his death, while remaining inculpable. Secondly, Gothic
fiction tends to be heavily punctuated by the richly suggestive metaphorical
qualities of the fog, particularly in the ways it accentuates - not exclusively
- the senses of mystery, intrigue, horror and the sublime. Its appearance
in Frankenstein’s exterior landscapes evokes its sublime quality, casting
upon the landscape the air of the ineffable and unknowable. It is, at the
same time a shroud that prevents clarity and knowledge, suggestive of the
way it enforces a metaphorical ‘blindness’, which reappears close to a
century later in Eliot’s The Waste Land. Bram Stoker’s Dracula is similarly
endowed, but in this work the fog takes on a miasmatic presence in the
ways it encircles terror, the supernatural, and death. Robert Louis Stevenson,
in The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, reworks the fog into his
urbanscape to heighten the inscrutability and unease of human concentrations
in city spaces. The fog has persistently endured through most ‘Gothicisms’,
its literal and connotative aspects perfect allies for representing, heightening,
and accentuating the Gothic poetics of the uncertain, the uncanny and the
ineffable.
(Terry Tay, 2004)
Gothic Fog
The gothic fog is a physical manifestation of all the unwanted consequences
of the Industrial Revolution on the nineteenth-century cityscape. The new
industries that were mushrooming around the city belched out smoke and
exhaust gases that polluted its landscape and resulted in many bodily afflictions
for its residents. Hence, with modern technologies came the simultaneous
rise of the “sickly city” and environmental degradation, two of many adversities
resulting from industrialization.
The pervasiveness of the fog—as seen in R. L. Stevenson’s Dr Jekyll
and Mr Hyde—also suggests that the city is becoming an inescapable entity
which one is forced to contend with. The fog will permeate the countryside
just as the city will encroach upon even the farthest boundaries of the
land. Even the human form is not spared from the harmful residual effects
of the burgeoning modern city. A person’s constant inhalation of the foggy
air may corrupt his senses, creating the ghastly “monsters” that we see
in much of gothic literature.
Because the fog also obscures one’s vision and hides things from view,
it also becomes a criminal ally to the deceptiveness of the city, whose
architecture is full of secret alleyways and unseen street corners. The
blurry fog therefore fuels the feelings of suspicion and mistrust among
the city dwellers, because one can no longer perceive another person’s
true nature, just as how the city’s physical landscape has been irretrievably
tainted with the fog.
(Hanna Maryam, 2006)
Hero/Villain
At once seductive and repulsive, the hero/villain is a classic figure
in gothic fiction; certainly one of the most easily recognizable pieces
of machinery in the grab bag of devices that make up the gothic convention.
So intrinsic is he to gothic fiction that Leslie Fiedler has been led to
claim, somewhat mistakenly, “that the hero-villain is indeed an invention
of the gothic form.” With his roots in Milton’s Satan, the sentimental
hero of the eighteenth century and the Byronic hero, the hero/villain can
be seen in the likes of Beckford’s Vathek, Walpole’s Manfred, Lewis’ Ambrosio,
Shelley’s Frankenstein and Stevenson’s Jekyll.
What makes the hero/villain so thoroughly attractive
is precisely his duality of nature. A morally ambiguous, contradictory
personality, the hero/villain is a figure torn by the conflict of good
and evil within him. An exploration of the nature of man and his psychology,
the hero/villain can perhaps be thought of as an internalized doppelgänger.
The duality of self that in the gothic represents the alter ego or antithesis
of the character; the hero/villain has within him his evil twin. Thus in
Stevenson’s Jekyll and Hyde we have Jekyll, in an misguided attempt to
eradicate the evil in man’s soul, splitting himself and creating Hyde;
an act which ultimately ends in the destruction of both.
Yet this is that which fascinates the reader and
lends him to sympathise and identify with the hero/villain. The hero/villain
is never intrinsically wicked, he is promethean, he is rebellious. Constantly
trying the boundaries of societal and ethical constraints, the hero/villain
is the archetypal overreacher, a figure unable to accept human limitations.
His conception is noble, just as Frankenstein’s creation of the monster
arose from a desire to emancipate humanity from the throes of death.
The danger of the hero/villain lies not merely in
his evil deeds, his malevolence or even his defiance of conventional moral
and legal restraints but in his function as a vehicle through which the
reader may indulge in the same transgressions. It is significant that Stevenson
never details Hyde’s crimes. By leaving them deliberately unspoken, Stevenson
invites the reader to fantasy and imagine what Hyde could possibly have
done and by doing so, effectively become Hyde. Ultimately however, the
otherness of the hero/villain results only in alienation and distancing.
A figure whose villainy gains him nothing, doomed to a tragic death, the
hero/villain is by far more pitiable than his insipid victims.
(Yin Mei Lenden-Hitchcock, 2006)
Home
The home became a means of exploring and uncovering social transgressions
in fin-de siecle gothic literature because of its apparent domesticity,
respectability, association with family history and its role as being the
most intimate shelter of privacy. Here, Freud’s principle of the uncanny,
derived from the word unheimlich, which interestingly means un-homely,
usefully explains this. Unheimlich gains its meaning from its apparent
opposite, heimlich, which means homely but it also means something that
is concealed, secret and made obscure. Therefore, the uncanny means something
that ought to have remained secret has now come to light. As such, homes
became the sites of concealed secrets that the fin-de-siecle gothic literature
attempts to uncover, since the genre is characterized by ideas of encountering
the internal decay of established societal structures.
The fin-de-siecle gothic writers’ conception of the home as a site
where their characters engaged and explored transgressions reflected the
Victorians’ frustration with a rigid social code demarcating boundaries
and markers around economic status and gender roles. In Stevenson’s The
Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Jekyll moves to the innermost sanctuary
of his home, the laboratory, to concoct mixtures that will set free his
repressed, violent and libidinal nature. This part of Jekyll’s nature
was distilled in the swarthy, working-class featured figure of Hyde, who
visibly transgresses accepted social conventions of Victorian middle class
life and respectability. Here, the home conceals these secret activities.
Yet, the home’s nature to “home” emphasizes its vulnerability to becoming
un-homed. When Hyde ventures out of the home at night and engages in activities
that attract the attention of Jekyll’s contemporaries, Jekyll’s secret
transformation to Hyde within his home runs the risk of being un-homed.
Indeed, this risk becomes a reality when Jekyll’s secret transformation
into Hyde suddenly takes place away from the home in Regent Park. Compellingly,
the notions of being homed and un-homed describes Jekyll and Hyde’s situation
in Regent Park as Hyde becomes unhomed, while Jekyll is homed (and trapped)
in a body he does not want to be in during the day as he moves through
a public space. Jekyll describes this fear in his final letter to
Dr Utterson:
“A moment before I had been safe of all man’s respect,
wealthy, beloved – the cloth laying for me in the dining room at home;
and now I was the common quarry of mankind, hunted, houseless, a known
murderer, thrall to the gallows” (Dr Jekyll, 72).
Here, Jekyll reverses his desires to transgress
social boundaries, emphasizing Victorian middle class anxieties of
being associated with and overwhelmed by the working class that were taking
up a large part of rapidly urbanized cities in the nineteenth century.
As such, Jekyll’s anxious desire for his home with all its trappings of
comfort, love and respectability emphasizes another conception of home
by the fin-de-siecle gothic writer, where secret social transgressions
within the home will potentially lead to the destruction or loss of the
home.
(Niluksi Koswanage, 2006)
The Host
The trope of the Host, latent in fin-de-siecle Gothic narratives, presents
the characteristic of multiplicity, as personified by the vampiric figure
who fleets from victim to victim as different hosts sites of prey, while
itself acting as a vessel for the victims’ intermingling blood. Dracula’s
imported boxes of earth are testament to this multiplicity, signaling also
the temporality of a host as a resting place. The ‘Host’ trope thus far
alludes to a turn-of-century London as a Capitalist society fuelled by
the practical profit motive, whilst operating as a hub for business dealings.
The ‘Host’ trope is ineluctably linked to its other,
the Foreign Body, and we find the gothic narrative the metaphorical Host
site for playing out its underlying tensions. The elusive yet definite
presence of the foreign body is epitomized by Dracula who as an unidentified
shadowy figure is the implicit orchestrator of events in London. It alludes
again to an apprehension towards the phenomenon of Capitalism and of its
invisible hand in restructuring Victorian society. The unease towards the
dormant existence of foreign bodies within the Host is represented by the
irreconciliable personalities of Dr Jekyll, which is in Freudian terms,
the suppression of the Super-ego by the Ego. Such a psychoanalytical aspect
of the ‘Host’ trope also borrows the language of the colonizer, underlying
a sense of territoriality and the desire to demarcate and maintain boundaries.
Dracula’s view of being a stranger in a strange land too is influenced
by a Hegelian wisdom; he states, “I’ve been so long master that I would
be master still or at least that none other should be master of me.”
The contamination of the Host as the main body bears
also religious undertones—as perversions of holy communion, the consumed
wafer that symbolises the body of Christ is also known as the Eucharistic
Host, which becomes warped in a parallel to Dracula who declares that Mina
will become “flesh of my flesh.” Overall, there is an anxiety of displacement
and a need for a sense of belonging that which iconic gothic characters
like Frankenstein and Dracula, whose existence in a liminal space within
their unwilling host societies represent.
(Yap Tshun-Min, 2006)
The Ineffable
The ineffable refers to that which is incapable of being expressed;
indescribable or unutterable. A second sense of the word connotes that
which should not be uttered – the taboo or the sacred.
The ineffable in gothic literature, however, may
conflate the taboo and the sacred, both sublime in their own rights. While
the great name of God can be ineffable, the terrible dread of a devil-like
creature like Dracula is just as ineffable; he is at times referred to
as “He” although such capitalisation is usually reserved for God. This
conflation could reflect how uncertainty towards religion has resulted
in superstition and its equally-ineffable origins.
More commonly, the ineffable in gothic texts foregrounds
the secrecy and withholding of information common in Victorian England;
the resultant hypocrisy veils what must be kept unspoken. Besides secrets,
the unconscious mind also remains hidden. Its inaccessibility and the analyst’s
desire to access it – eg. through hypnosis in Dracula – is a common trope.
The detective novel can also be seen as a quest to uncover and express
the ineffable, but many overdetermined symbols present problems of definition
to detectives and readers. The ineffable can thus be seen as a response
that either resists definition, or refuses to try defining anymore.
Frankenstein’s monster’s language-learning process
draws attention to the failure of words to articulate adequately. This
inadequacy comes about in an age of changing literary taste fuelled partly
by the efficiency that the 19th century’s financial and industrial revolutions
demanded. To gothic writers, the ineffable may well be a better alternative
to the inadequacy of words.
(Lionel Lye, 2006)
Gothic Intertextuality
Gothic intertextuality can be seen as a vampiric form of drawing elements
from other texts, of sucking key ideas and characteristics into its own
narrative body to nourish and enrich itself. Intertextuality exists everywhere
in all literary genres, but Gothic intertextuality stands apart from the
usual usage as it both subverts and perverts the original meanings and
intentions of the original text, in a bid to overturn, question and invert
its significance. Examples of this can be seen in both Frankenstein and
Jekyll and Hyde, where Biblical references are made for the sole purpose
of challenging and undermining its religious import, thus constituting
a form of blasphemous truncation. In the latter novel, Ephesians 2:14 is
used to refer to how Jekyll has used science to split himself into two
beings, thus deviating from and upending the original Biblical meaning.
The multiplicity of jarring intertextual sources used in Gothic texts also
works to create deliberate dissonance and deep destabalisation within its
narratives, being in line with how the Gothic as a genre seeks to critically
interrogate, topple and displace existing social norms and beliefs, of
revealing the darker nature of the self and society that lies hidden within.
A key example would be the use of Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient
Mariner” in Frankenstein, where the Romantic journey motif is subverted
by how there is no proper end or closure to Walton and Victor’s physical
and scientific journeys undertaken, thus refuting the possible positive
ending to Coleridge’s poem.
(Magdalene Poh, 2006)
Landscape
Landscape plays an important function in gothic literature, although
its significance varies according to the socio-historical context in which
a particular gothic text is found, and obviously according to the narrative
structure of the individual text as well. In early gothic texts such
as in the novels of Ann Radcliffe, protagonists (often young, sheltered
and naïve girls) undertook journeys to a far-off, exoticised land
which was portrayed as a realm of danger, excess, and the breakdown of
the controls and restrictions of the domestic and “civilized” space.
Thus these exotic lands – often the stereotypical Catholic and Mediterranean
spaces of Italy and Spain, whose inhabitants were portrayed as volatile,
treacherous and governed by uncontrolled passions – became not only socio-political
antitheses to the “safe” space of England (although even this was ultimately
unsettled by the characteristic gothic doubling), but also a symbol for
the inner landscape of restriction, exposure to the other, temptation,
the finding of a new balance, and return.
In terms of more specifically psychological processes, the gothic
journey and the projection of internal significance onto an external landscape
might be read as various forms of representation and resolution (“projection”
and “introjection,” the ebb and flow of life processes such as aging and
the life cycle or desire, sexuality, tensions between two opposing selves).
For examples of such readings of gothic literature, see Maud Bodkin’s reading
of “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” in Archetypal Patterns in Poetry:
Psychological Studies of Imagination; or Anne Williams’ essays on various
gothic texts in Art of Darkness: A Poetics of Gothic. In this mode
of signification, landscape elements such as the sea, the sublime mountains,
various forms of waste land, the dual-entry house, and so on, assume heavily-overdetermined
meanings tied to the complexities of deep psychological processes.
Exoticised landscapes are thus always closely related to the
trope of the gothic other – those Moors, Italians, Indians, Russians, Africans,
Jews, East Europeans, and other strange types who crop up throughout gothic
literature, and whose function is at least in part to embody the social
and political anxieties of England’s encounters with its colonies and competitors.
While colonial gothic narratives are most obviously concerned with the
anxious placement of England vis-à-vis its colonial spaces, all
gothic literature in varying ways reflects the anxiety of place in an age
of growing global contact and interaction.
(Robbie Goh, 2004)
LETTERS
Letters to a phantom sister, wills, transcript, journal entries, newspaper entries; Gothic narratives are punctuated with embedded writings in the form of letters and entries that are both a pastiche and fragmented, the sum total of which makes up the complete text. Letters while seemingly presenting objectivity on one level through the assumed tone of factuality, are also simultaneously open and subject to interpretation. It is linked to a reading of words as well as a misreading. There are letters that are not replied in Frankenstein, letters that may not have reached their destination, letters of secrecy in Jekyll and Hyde, letters that chronicle events—these letters attempt to present to us an understanding of what happened, reiterated with the supposed advantage of retrospect and an over-arching perspective that is allowed by the passing of time. However, as the paths of these letters are always dubious, it calls to attention its own in-authenticity and hence the potential for a misreading since we are never always sure if what we are reading is accurately represented. In other words, what has happened is always fragmented and there can be no complete reading of events.
These fragments also call to attention the reliability of information
in an age where information is becoming increasingly available, as seen
from the inclusion of newspaper reports in Dracula and the fact that distance
is no longer a barrier to words. Some letters and entries, instead of being
handwritten, are now type-written which displaces the personal touch of
the writer from the reader and handwriting can no longer be a measure of
authenticity. Anything, including words, can be reproduced. This links
the idea of letters to modern communication and technology. The use of
problematic embedded narratives illustrates an anxiety about the increasing
ease of communication and whether more information really means knowing
more. Narratives within narratives draw to attention its own artificiality
and the question of whether there can be an original sequence of events
behind what is narrated. At the same time, letters are also clearly letters
of the alphabet which cues the reader in to the notion that all that is
being read is a construct of “letters”. Perhaps over-determined, but letters
open the doors to the multitude of readings and misreadings in the Gothic
world.
(Felicia Chan, 2006)
Madness
The motif of madness runs through many Gothic novels, and is often articulated
by the characters themselves. Characters question their own sanity, or
the sanity of other characters. Madness is also often portrayed as a hereditary
disease, insidiously affecting a character’s psychological and mental health
without him/her realizing it. Oftentimes, the strain of madness in a character
in such novels is not obvious, nor overtly stated. The authors merely present
the characters’ actions, often of uncontrollable passions, and extreme
irrationality, in order to illustrate the mental ills of a character. This
also means that madness is often not easily detectable, and it is this
characteristic that allows Gothic plots to develop since such texts focus
on finding out what and why a seeming inexplicable event occurred.
Madness in the Gothic novel is not merely an oft occurring aspect of the
genre, but also has larger social implications, especially when placed
within the context of Victorian England. Forces and situations that rational
society fears engender an anxiety of the insane and mentally ill. Precisely
because madness is often not recognized easily, fear of the unknown, as
well as fear of having the insane living amongst themselves in society,
was a major factor in influencing the productions of works with such a
theme.
This theme enhances the ominous mood of the novels, and creates a sense
of uncertainty as madness also implies lack of logic and reason, and hence
a lack of predictable behaviour. An fear-inspiring atmosphere is also evoked,
with the spectre of the insane painted as a terrible vision, such as Bertha
Mason in Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre. Other examples of novels in which
madness is an aspect of the plot are Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Emily
Bronte’s Wuthering Heights, Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret, and
Wilkie Collins’ The Woman in White.
(Belinda
He, 2004)
Madness
Madness remains
as one of the most recognisable concepts in Gothic literature. The most
common association with “madness” is with that of a mental condition where
one is deemed to be “irrational”. Most pervasively, “madness” is conceived
as a form of illness or disease, a condition not to be found in one of
a sound constitution. However, what Gothic literature seeks to do is to
break down the notion of “madness” as a clinical condition afflicting only
a select few; it instead suggests the importance of regarding “madness”
as that which is present but repressed in us, and our own concurrent fear
of its expression in our personality. As such, “madness” is not in polarity
with “sanity”; “madness” and “sanity” are both present in our psyche. The
self can thus be better understood in its entirety when “madness” and “sanity”
are held in a dialectical relationship with each other.
What then
results in an inherent fear of “madness” is the anxiety that a realm of
“irrationality” can possibly exist within oneself. The nearness of “madness”
is thus the paranoia shown in Gothic literature; paranoia is not of “madness”
itself. This anxiety leads to a displacement of the qualities of “madness”
onto another body (a designated Other), outside of oneself. As such, the
use of “mirror-images” of a character who is “sane” and another who is
“mad” is a device of Gothic literature in subversion of the common notion
of “madness” as something of the few and obscure, to reconstruct it as
an essential part of normalcy.
(Michelle Liu,
2006)
MADNESS
Madness, in the
form of defined psychological illness, substance-induced states, and self-asserted
madness, is consistently found in the Gothic. The pervasiveness of this
trope both reflects the shape of the Gothic text—as disorderly and excessive—and
suggests the expression, through madness, of an ineffable quality that
lacked semantic form, being prior to Freud. The fear of madness is also
the fear of a specifically masculine loss of control, the product of various
insecurities about manhood in an era where women were gaining economic
independence. Joined with the atmosphere of restraint, control was mandatory.
Madness was its polar opposite and therefore proved terrifying, so had
to be safely sublimated via the edifice of literature.
References to madness in literature arose in the context of a society that
was fascinated with and repelled by clinical madness, and which increasingly
institutionalized insanity, building asylums like the one featured in Stoker’s
Dracula. The attempt to contain madness, however, has the reverse effect
of blurring the boundary separating the sane from the insane: Renfield,
literally presented as mad, attempts to save Mina from Dracula’s entrance
in a performance more than worthy of a Victorian gentleman, bringing into
question the purported sanity of everyone else. In contrast, Jonathan Harker
and Frankenstein’s titular character are implicated in the institution
of madness but never appear to be perceived as such by their companions.
The condition of madness is arbitrary and slippery, and remains as dangerous
subtextual disturbance beneath overt norms of rationality and progress.
[Alina Ng, 2006]
Mad Scientist
A figure that appears in Gothic fiction after the Romantic period,
reflecting both Victorian society's fascination with science and their
fear that scientific knowledge will eventually lead to the destruction
of society and morality.
The mad scientist’s “irrationality” or “madness”
derives from his inability to conform to societal order and institutionalised
law. Unlike the Romantic rebel, the figure of the mad scientist is a figure
of horror because it cannot be contained by the status quo. The mad scientist
figure indulges in antisocial behaviour, staying isolated and working apart
from the rest of society. He is inconsistent with the principles of reason,
inventing a field of study that goes again known scientific theories and
is impossible rationally. Examples of such fields and inventions include
Victor Frankenstein's Galvanism, Jekyll's Chemical Transformation, and
Stapleton's Fluorescent Phosphorus Compound.
The mad scientist replaces “the figure of the scientist
as hero”, which the critic Postlewait notes was one of the most popular
ideas in the nineteenth century. Especially towards the end of the nineteenth
century, the British found it increasingly difficult to think that they
were inevitably progressive. The mad scientist’s forays into science started
revealing bodily and moral degeneration, reflecting Victorian fears that
civilisation was declining instead of progressing.
The mad scientist works towards fulfilling his desires
which are uncontrolled by the “Law of the Father”. In Gothic fiction, the
mad scientist is intimately related to two figures through doubling tropes:
the Monster and the Rational Scientist. The Monster is the Mad Scientist’s
creation, but also provides a dialectical relationship that suggests both
monster and creator (who is desirous and willing to transgress) are Freudian
projections of desires that transgress the boundaries of the status quo
sexually, morally, legally and so on. The rational scientist is usually
the hero to the mad scientist’s villainy, the positive anti-thesis who
saves society from the Monster created by the mad scientist. However, the
doubling also highlights similarities between the Rational and Mad scientists,
even as they purportedly show differences. For example, Conan Doyle’s Stapleton
uses the same logic and strategic cunning that is characteristic of Sherlock
Holmes to outwit Holmes in London. The doubling functions to show that
both the Mad and Rational Scientists are not two separate entities, but
two sides of the same coin. The mad scientist demonstrates the self within
that is feared because it is creative, yet libidinous and difficult to
control
(Ann Koh, 2006)
Misogyny
Male misogyny is a prominent theme in gothic literature, varying in
its treatment of the Victorian woman from barely acknowledging her presence
to demonising her. This attitude arises from a number of socio-cultural
developments in the Victorian era, such as the growing prominence of women
beyond the domestic circle and growing masculine insecurity. The fact that
such attitudes are reflected as early as Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein, and
by a female author no less, show that misogyny in Gothic texts are not
simply male adolescent fantasies but reflections of underlying currents
of thought and fears of the period.
Fear of female sexuality is a key part of misogyny in Gothic
texts, wherein it becomes a force that threatens to overwhelm the masculine
self in texts like Dracula or Ollalla. It is the fear of the vagina detenta,
in which the female sexuality is alluring to the male, yet also involves
a symbolic castration of male virility. Often, in such texts, physical
violence, shrouded in phallic terms such as the stake used on Lucy in Dracula
or the tearing apart of Elizabeth in Frankenstein, is used to symbolically
exorcise the threat to the masculine self and allow the male to continue
partaking in purely masculine activities. Such violence and activities
not only restore the male self-belief in his masculinity, but also serve
as a containment of the female by isolating her away from the realm of
the male, thereby removing the “threat” of her presence to male superiority.
The concept of the hunt or adventure, for instance, as a purely masculine
enterprise in a great number of gothic texts reveal deep-seated fears of
women entering and surpassing men in what were previously solely male activities,
such as business.
(Tang Chee Mun, 2004)
The Missing Mother
The typical gothic mother is absent or dead. If the mother is
alive and well, such as Lucy’s mother in Bram Stoker’s Dracula, she is
associated with the incapacity to carry out her maternal duties. The typical
gothic mother has to be killed in order for the domestic instability that
underpins the gothic text to flourish. Only the occasional evil or
deviant mother (Olalla’s mother in Robert Louis Stevenson’s “Olalla” for
example), is allowed to survive in the gothic text. Even then, the evil
and deviant mother figure (such as H.R Haggard’s titular character in She)
has to be removed eventually for there to be some sort of closure to the
gothic text.
The repression of the mother allows the progression of the narrative
in the gothic mode. The missing mother also serves as a social commentary
where her absence and silence highlight the repression of women within
an overwhelming patriarchal regime.
The missing mother points to the absence of regulation and the
absence of stability in the family, hence the desire for the male characters
to usurp the maternal role and circumvent the female’s role in procreation
(Victor Frankenstein and Dr Jekyll do that in their respective fictional
worlds). At the same time, the missing mother is a signifier for the stranglehold
of men over the legal and physical self-agency of the women in gothic texts.
(Choo Li Lin, 2006)
Monster:
An archetypal
figure that acts as a central symbol and character, tying together individuals,
themes, and world of the Gothic novel. Many features of the Gothic,
(pathos, terror, sublime, supernatural, landscape) are embodied figuratively
and literally within this character. There is a shifting of taboo
onto this safer symbol which allows a remaining implicit connection to
original taboo meanings. Often it becomes an over-determined symbolic
figure with many meaning or associations that are potentially contradictory.
The monster destabilizes
assumptions about societal structures and institutions, knowledge, self,
secret vices. Stevenson’s Jekyll and Hyde (1886) is fuelled with
fears surrounding rising urban populations, human regression and the instabilities
of identity. Embodying the monster and the civilized into one totally removes
the concept of a separate other. Tension then arises between the
image of the degenerate and unseen essence of degeneration. The horror
of the monster coming from within is reflected through this transgressive
figure of Hyde, who is in fact inseparable from Jeykll.
A monster
created inverts notions of natural creation and a traditional religious
belief system. Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein (1817), depicts a monster
that serves as a metonymy of social ugliness that created him. On
an individual level, he also mirrors his creator Frankenstein, suggesting
a sometimes unstable split between the two. As the dark other, the
monster interrogates and defines by opposition within the context of the
novel’s world and also as a larger symbol to societal concerns. A
close relationship between narrative form and social ideology expands the
idea of implicit challenge to the main character’s notions of superiority.
The “other” is a subversion of Victorian high culture and hidden monstrosities
in society itself are displayed, revealed, suggested through this figure.
(Kimberley Yap, 2004)
Monster
Commonly regarded
as an overdetermined symbol in gothic literature, the idea of the monster
can be regarded in a different light when considering its etymological
roots. The Oxford English Dictionary informs us that the word “monster”
originates from the classical Latin word “monstrum”, meaning “portent,
prodigy, monstrous creature, wicked person, monstrous act, or atrocity”,
and this is taken from the base of the word “monstre”, meaning “to warn”.
Likewise, the monster in novels such as Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is
more than just a fearful figure, but also one that stands as a symbolic
mirror held up to society in order to critique it. Because the monster
is, more often than not, a creation of the very society in which it inhabits,
the actual form of the creature could be said to be the crystallization
of the very fears of that society. Just as Frankenstein’s monster is cobbled
together from various body parts, so too is a monster characteristic of
a city and its fears, where the monster can stand for and represent anything
from the fear of the father to the fear of losing one’s property. Since
one of its root meanings is “to warn”, perhaps too, the monster in gothic
literature serves as a warning to its society to be aware of the very ills
that have begotten it, by showing that it is not only the very thing in
which the society’s fears are displaced into, but also the very embodiment
of it.
[Jaclyn Wong, 2006]
Monster:
The monster within the gothic genre is usually depicted as the “other”
of the “self” within the novel. It is usually ‘ugly’ or distorted in nature
however not only in the physicality of the creature/ individual’s form
but also in other aspects like psychological or emotional. The ‘ugly’ nature
or distortion of the monster is defined by a group of people or the society
that it resides in within the novel. In other words, the nature of the
monster itself goes against everything that the “self” within the novel
vouches to be, for example the “self” having established as good hence
places the monster, its nemesis or it’s “other”, as evil. This could be
clearly seen in the figures of Dr Jekyll and Mr. Hyde in which the former
is placed as the ‘self’/ good whilst the latter is known as the ‘other’/evil.
The concept of the monster within the gothic genre has progressed significantly
over the years. One clear movement would be that of the progression from
the ‘romantic’ monster to the ‘fin de siècle’ monster. The differences
between the two are not only found in the physicality of the creatures
themselves in which the ‘romantic’ monster is bigger and more physically
monstrous than the ‘fin de siècle’ monster. There is also a duly
noted concept that the distancing of the “other” from the “self” has been
narrowed with such a progress. One clear example to reflect this would
be a comparison of the Frankenstein’s monster and Mr. Hyde. Whilst the
Frankenstein’s monster’s other-ness could be more easily established within
its novel, the other-ness of Mr. Hyde is more illusive because the “other”
of the ‘fin de siècle’ monster seems to have somehow merged with
the “self”, hence the boundary between these two has been blurred and crossed
till the difference between the two becomes more difficult to establish.
(Nenny Triana, 2006)
Monster
Generally, the word “monster” is used simplistically to indicate an
imaginary evil creature, horrifying both in appearance and behavior, and
ultimately to be destroyed by the forces of good.
On one level, the Gothic retains these characteristic traits: Hyde
is a short and appears physically deformed being who terrorizes Soho, while
Frankenstein’s monster is a horrifying patchwork of limbs intent on destroying
his creator’s happiness. On another level however, the Gothic frustrates
any attempt to label the two opposing parties in polarized terms of good
and evil, and serves as a warning against our tendencies to prematurely
judge anything which we instinctively deem as unsettling because of it’s
nonconformity to societal norms.
Authoral ambiguity in Frankenstein for instance, forces the reader
to suspend judgment of both Frankenstein and his monster when narrative
objectivity is replaced with multiple subjective narratives. While Frankenstein
condemns his creation and warns against the monster’s sympathetic narrative,
his warning reflects Frankenstein’s own imbibed prejudice, such that even
Walton is at a loss as to whom to trust. Similarly, Dracula is more than
simply a manifestation of Evil: while the men’s hatred for him is understandable,
Stoker presents us with an alternative understanding of him as a man suffering
the same curse as both Mina and Lucy, thus revealing the possibility of
both the monstrous (in this case, vampiric) face within the self as well
as the familiar self in the monstrous other.
(Fazylah Bte Abd Rahman, 2006)
MONSTROSITY
In 18th century aesthetic and moral criticism, the word ‘monster’ signified
ugliness, irrationality and all things and events unnatural. It was viewed
as the antithesis of neo-classical values of harmony and unified composition.
A monster portrayed an image of deformity and irregularity. In literary
terms, it involved works that crossed the boundaries of reason and morality,
presenting excessive and viciously improper scenes and characters.
In M. G. Lewis’s The Monk, the protagonist has been attacked in reviews
for being a monster, that is, for representing and encouraging every type
of improper, depraved and licentious behaviour. Indeed, the numerous evil
aristocrats, monks and quasi-paternal figures – the staple villains of
Gothic novels – display characteristics of monstrosity throughout Gothic
fiction of that period.
The monster and the notion of monstrosity serve a useful critical and moral
function in the Gothic tradition as a composite term for a collection of
negative and socially unacceptable features. As overt displays of vice,
monsters presented and cautioned readers against excessive and indulgence
in improper behaviour – thus emphasizing the values and benefits of morally
upright and honourable conduct and evoking the socially-expected reactions
to examples of vice.
The monstrous disclosure of the instability of systems of moral and aesthetic
meaning produced ambivalent monsters, best evinced in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein
(1818). Imbued with Romantic sympathies for the outcast and rebel, the
novel presents a humane and suffering monster, less a figure of vice and
transgression and more a victim of monstrous social exclusions. Indeed,
blurring the boundaries between good and bad, human and monster, the novel
interrogates prevailing value systems to the extent that monstrosity becomes
uncannily pervasive, an effect of and intrinsic to the sphere of the human.
(Caslin Luo, 2004)
Nature
Nature, in the Gothic, is often the symbol for that which is sublime
and, accordingly, that which is transcendental and extraordinary. The symbol
is underscored in the absence of God, faith, and religion and its institutions
from the text. Repetitive and descriptive use of Nature in the text appears
to recall a more ancient religion, pantheism, particularly in light of
the stark absence of a Christian God. In Shelley’s Frankenstein, there
are many instances where the word “Nature” can be seen as taking the place
of “God”, such as when Frankenstein said “[the learned philosopher] might
dissect, anatomise, and give names… but causes in their secondary and tertiary
grades were utterly unknown to him”. In the age of rapid scientific progress,
much of Nature is still unknown to man, despite his best attempts to master
it. This, coupled with Frankenstein’s disastrous attempt at mastering Nature,
ultimately interrogates the scientific project and the futility of having
mastery over that which he cannot fully or even adequately comprehend.
There is, however, a repeated emphasis on Man’s nearness to Nature in the
text through his admiration of it; even the monster is not immune to its
ineffable beauty. There is a sense of order in the world through Man’s
“oneness” with Nature, as the instance of Frankenstein’s self-inscribed
seclusion while creating the monster suggests—his “[insensibility] to the
charms of nature” coincides with his undertaking of the project that goes
against the laws of Nature and therefore disturbs this sense of ordering.
The stark absence of God and Christian faith in
the text and the various descriptions of Nature in God-like terms highlight
the way in which the Gothic indirectly interrogates the relevance of a
Christian faith in an increasingly secularized society. In place of Christianity,
it seems to suggest a throwback to an ancient pantheistic view of the world,
ironically—even as science and technology supposedly enable society to
“progress” at even more rapid rates—as a more coherent way of ordering
the world.
(Denise Li, 2006)
Occultism:
Occultism, in
relation to ordinary knowledge, is as the esoteric is to the exoteric.
Etymologically, ‘occult’ means ‘concealed’ and is unrelated to ‘cult’ which
means ‘worship’ but the genre of the Gothic makes a cult out of the occult.
The esoteric societies taught theories that differed considerably from
modern science but had as much claim on public imagination at a time when
Christian orthodoxy was being challenged and reinforced.
The Occult sciences
were based on the ancient schemata of the four qualities (hot, cold, moist,
dry), the four humors (blood, choler, phlegm, bile), the four elements
(fire, air, water, earth) and the four temperaments (choleric, sanguine,
phlegmatic, melancholy). Following a pre-Copernican perspective, traditional
occult sciences form a hierarchy reaching from the study of alchemy (concerned
with the terrestrial world) to astrology (the influences of the celestial
bodies) and cabbalism (the ‘super-celestial’ or the archetypal world).
Using natural or white magic, an occultist may divine the workings of the
universe; or may influence the course of events to personal ends through
black or malefic magic.
The novelist Charles
Williams (1886-1945) was one of the many prominent writers affiliated with
esoteric societies and he presents many ideas of the occult in his novels
where the motive force behind the stories is the human desire to find order
in a chaos of esoteric teachings. Occult ideology is shown to enter an
otherwise traditionally Christian world of the Victorian novelist in the
early 20th Century.
(Nicole Kwan,
2004)
"Other"-Anxiety
The gothic anxiety about the monstrous “Other” is fore-grounded when
the apparent simplicity of the self/other relationship as a clear binary
breaks down into something more complex under close examination. The self
experiences immense fear, not only towards the failure of containment of
the “other”, but also in having identified latent similarities between
itself and its evil twin.
As noted in Chapter Two, Victor Frankenstein fears
most what he cannot control -- that part of himself most closely allied
to his monster. Each of his attempts to seize control fails; each failure
contributes to his fear. That which Victor fears yet toward which he is
obsessively drawn has been usefully outlined by Nietzsche as a dichotomy
between Apollo and Dionysus (binary of Apollonian/Dionysian), that is,
between rational thought and everything that escapes or exceeds rationality.
As Victor discovered, what exceeds rationality appears monstrous.
In Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, fear stems from recognition
of the horror within, one that lies latent, repressed, concealed but emerges
with retaliative violence, destruction and evil when permitted to surface.
Notably, Jekyll is an apparent respectable man who contains within him
a potential for profound wickedness that is released in the shape of Mr
Hyde. His desire to “upgrade” himself, in want of respect, honour, and
distinction in Victorian society, spurs him to conceal any irregularities
in his life. It is in the unveiling of this corollary—the greater the bourgeois
aspirations towards good of Jekyll, the greater the monstrosity of Hyde—that
the self recoils in horror.
(Anne Tng, 2006)
"Othering”
The Gothic problematic of “othering” may be usefully approached by
understanding its narrative as the product of anxiety stemming from a rapidly
booming industrialist Victorian society. The Gothic text, then, is to the
society what Hyde is to Jekyll. Despite an inherent narrative “monstrosity”
(I borrow Chris Baldick’s term here), the Gothic text cannot be “othered”
from the society (and ‘conventional’ narrative) it mirrors, because it
is born from the troubled suspicion of this same society’s advancement.
In this same respect, Frankenstein as “Romantic Gothic” cannot be properly
regarded as “other” from the Romance paradigm, because it really is the
“bastard” of its own narrative father, in the same way Hyde is a baser
version of Jekyll’s self. Dracula, too, cannot be “other” to human; he
cannot be the antithesis of life (i.e. death) when he is “Un-Dead.” Catherine’s
famous three words in Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights perhaps most excellently
pronounce the Gothic paradox of “othering”: “I am Heathcliff.” Self-identity
can only be affirmed not through the mirroring of self in other, but through
the self being the other. Jekyll becomes his own other, when he recognises
that Hyde is “(other) than (himself)” and yet is “(himself).” In the same
way that Frankenstein’s monster is “other” to himself, it also validates
him, because it is an extension of his own powers of science. Similarly,
there must be a Dracula in every human subject, if this vampirish symbol
of the id is only waiting to break through the constraints of the ego and
super-ego.
(Yeo Huan, 2006)
Paranoia
/ Hysteria.
Symptoms of psychiatric illnesses, but also terms to describe the modes
of narrative that are operative in Gothic literature. Eve Sedgwick aligns
the paranoid / hysteric modes with another common characterisation of Gothic
literature, that of ‘male’ Gothic (‘horror’) in the case of the former
and ‘female’ Gothic (‘terror’) for the latter.
In this light, one paranoid Gothic text may be that of Bram’s Stoker’s
Dracula, with the male protagonists (Jonathan, van Helsing et al) hunting
down and eliminating the senex irratus of the Dracula-figure (who disrupts
coitus and threatens to take over progenitive function) which has already
been established in the text as a foreign Other as well as a bloodsucking
Satanic figure. A text that displays Gothic hysteric narrative traits may
be Arthur Conan Doyle’s Hound of the Baskervilles: the reader together
with Watson is plunged into an environment of uncertainty and danger at
Dartsmoor, with a mythic diabolical hound roaming the moors, haunting the
imagination of Watson and his protectee. The use of Gothic traits in this
text, however, may be described as a qualified one: human reason in the
figure of Holmes finally still beats the day, with any supernatural phenomena
attributed to clever scientific villainy.
The Freudian take on both illnesses, with both paranoia and hysteria arising
from the ego’s need to protect itself through the mechanism of repression,
may be useful here. Both modes of narrative in their medical equivalent
in being departures from normality in mental states also depart radically
from any ‘classic’ depiction of the everyday, with heightened sensibilities
also serving to destabilise what is ‘normal’ and ‘usual’ in Victorian England,
with latent meaning needing to be investigated behind the repressive respectability
of manifest meaning of everyday culture and moral values, as in the case
of domesticity and sexuality.
See: Eve Sedgwick’s The Conventions of Gothic Literature, Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan’s writing on psychoanalysis.
(Tan Simin, 2004)
Purity
The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) defines purity as the quality or
condition of being pure in various aspects . In general, it signifies “faultlessness,
correctness”, and especially “freedom from matter that contaminates, defiles,
corrupts, or debases; physical cleanness”. The idea of purity is also specifically
relevant to the individual, denoting an unblemished character, innocence,
and the condition of “chastity, ceremonial cleanness” in one of the earliest
uses of the word.
In gothic literature, the issue of purity is commonly a source of anxiety,
having religious, social, and even political significance. The anxiety
begins very probably as a result of a Judeo-Christian religious heritage;
because God is pure and cannot abide impurity, sinful man has to continually
struggle between holy and earthly desires. This physically unbridgeable
distance between God and man is further strained by the threat of rejection
“…Touch no unclean thing, and I will receive you.” in 2 Corinthians 6:17,
The Holy Bible (New International Version).
In all other associations, one may see the great concern with purity
through the extent to which the idea of mixture, invasion and corruption
play a part in gothic narratives such as Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, R.L.
Stevenson’s Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, and Bram Stoker’s Dracula. For instance,
each of these narratives purposes to tell a tale or report a strange case,
but the integrity of each narrative is compromised by the epistolary form
that is inevitably subjective and incomplete in knowledge. In addition,
the heterogeneity of voices—especially in Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and Dracula—suggests
the difficulty of sustaining a single correct perspective. The threat of
impurity is consequently played out in the struggle between human and monstrous
protagonists, the overarching human anxiety being aptly voice by Frankenstein
when he expressed the fear that “a race of devils would be propagated
upon the earth who might make the very existence of the species of man
a condition precarious and full of terror” (160). In short, purity means
such a lot in gothic literature because the alternative is an uncontainable,
and therefore unsafe, sublimity.
References
Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein. England: Penguin Group, 1994.
Stevenson, R.L. Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. Great Britain: Wordsworth Edition
Limited, 1999.
Stoker, Bram. Dracula. London: Penguin Group, 2003.
(Tan Su Linn, 2004)
Queer Gothic
In 1895, Oscar Wilde was convicted of homosexuality because of his
gothic novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray. He pleaded that homosexuality
was “the love that dares not speak its name”. Following Wilde’s suggestion,
queer critics often read the unspeakable, secrets and gaps in gothic narratives
as -- to use Foucault’s terms -- repressive apparatuses of sexuality. It
is, therefore, not coincidental that the first gothic novel, The Castle
of Otranto (1765), was written by a gay man, Horace Walpole. The mid-eighteenth
century saw the legislation of anti-homosexuality laws and homosexuality
was increasingly policed. The policing was, in turn, introjected into the
gothic writers’ imagination, and even though the writers could not speak
of their sexuality explicitly, they reshaped their primal material and
forbidden desires into gothic narratives where sometimes the gaps in the
narratives call forth the uncanny, which allows a queer reading such as
Elaine Showalter’s “Dr. Jekyll’s Closet”.
Following Foucault’s argument that homosexuals
became a species, monsters, as the gothic other, may represent the homosexual;
they threaten the heteronormative society and have to be expunged. For
example, in Richard Dyer’s “Children of the Night”, he likens the discovery
of Dracula as a vampire and his death to the discovery of the homosexual
and the expurgation of homosexuality.
However, it is not necessary to read all monsters
and/or androgynous characters as homosexuals. What gothic narratives are
most concerned with are the anxiety of gender relations with the rise of
the “New Woman” and the negotiations of masculinity in an age of capitalism
and colonialism.
(Aaron Ho, 2006)
Rationality
During the late 18th century to the late 19th century, breakthroughs
in the fields of chemistry and electricity strongly suggested the world
was determined by natural, irrefutable laws and equations. This flourishing
of the sciences arose from the age of Enlightenment which posited that
rationality and reason lead to progress. However the Gothic movement departed
from the rationality of the Enlightenment in its rejection of reason and
decorum. Instead, the Gothic questioned, and was a reaction, to this discourse
of unproblematic progress through rationality. It explored the effects
on society which developed from this economic-rational discourse, such
as the dawning of the Industrial Age. This is seen in Frankenstein,
Dr. Jekyll and Mr Hyde, and Dracula. In these texts, the application of
science and rationality not only produces monstrosities that turn on society
but fail as well to explain the supernatural and the metaphysical. Rationality
breaks down when society is shown to be beyond predetermination by mere
equations. The Gothic explores the unreasonable and chaotic universe, rife
with twisted desires where “progress” and the veneer of reason and rationality
only conceal repressed desires paradoxically brought about by such values.
It shows how the power of science can indeed transform life but not always
positively and without cost. Rationality is also subverted through the
narrative form of the Gothic. In place of realism and objectivity are the
use of questionable narrators and unstable, subjective epistolary forms.
Against the uncanny and the dominance of the Id, rationality breaks down
and rationality’s dark contrary, madness, takes thematic precedence in
the Gothic novel.
(Winston Cheong, 2006)
Religion
Christianity is both very much present and absent in Gothic literature.
In Dracula, religion features prominently in the fight against the vampire
– Van Helsing, Harker and Mina frequently invoke the name of God for supernatural
and divine aid against the power of Dracula. Yet, there is also a disturbing
sense that God is strangely absent, or at best, distant, within the novel.
God’s power seems limited – captured and contained within material shapes
and symbols such as the Host, Indulgences, and the Crucifix. The men who
hunt down Dracula are dependent on the trappings of religion without true
substance. Christianity thus becomes reduced to transferable property.
God is also sidelined in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.
On one hand, while Biblical allusions to God as Creator abound in the novel,
it is always in juxtaposition to the transgression of Victor Frankenstein
as the mad scientist. Again, God is invoked only when an immediate threat
is identified, as Victor laments and appeals to God to grant him the strength
to defeat and destroy his monster. Christianity as the dominant religion
in nineteenth century England was thoroughly interrogated and questioned,
its beliefs in an Almighty God challenged as science and technology assumed
prominence. Gothic authors, themselves questioning the relevance of religion,
foregrounded these issues by presenting Christianity in a dubious light
– present, but altogether powerless, shallow and somewhat deficient.
(Fong Minghui, 2006)
The romance paradigm
The gothic narrative very often is a mirror and subversion of the romance
paradigm. The romance framework, given definition by Northrop Frye,
involves a (relatively) young hero undergoing a transformative experience
in overcoming the obstacles that stand in his way of attaining the heroine
of his dreams, the jeune fille (Fr. ‘young girl’). The main obstacle
usually takes the form of a senex iratus (Lat. ‘angry old man’), often
her father, who thwarts the fruition of his desires of a marital union
with her. The hero is then sent into exile but he subsequently returns
home to wed the jeune fille. The gothic, however, while borrowing
from the romance, is its perverse doppelganger. The gothic typically
ends not in marriage, but in the interruption of coitus (Lat. ‘sexual intercourse’),
where the hero does not attain his desired union with the heroine.
Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) and Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) are
two useful examples to illustrate this. The blissful unions of Victor
Frankenstein and Arthur Godalming with their wives are thwarted by angry
‘father’ figures – the former’s consummation of marriage with Elizabeth
is frustrated by the monster while the latter loses Lucy to Count Dracula.
Another way this subversion is played out is evident in the homosocial
world of Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr.
Hyde. The marked absence of any possibility of a blissful union with
a jeune fille negates the heterosexual love and courtship of the romance.
(Jacqueline Chia, 2006)
Secrets
Secrets, namely that which is ‘unspeakable’ is a distinctive gothic
trope. In literary novels, secrets are knowledge deliberately concealed
from the readers and/or from the characters involved. In gothic literature,
secrets aid in creating a sense of suspense, hinging on a scandal or mystery
and subsequently lead to a shocking revelation at the end. Often, a foreboding
shadow is cast upon those who withhold secrets, be it a dark family history
or a Faustian pact as exemplified by Shelley’s Frankenstein and Stevenson’s
Dr Jekyll who are both possessors of an ‘unspeakable’ knowledge which allows
them to transcend the limits and abilities of man but eventually at the
expense of their sanity, friends and lives.
The secrecy of identity and sexuality is also prevalent in Gothic literature
where the ambiguity and anonymity of informers and correspondents add to
the overarching mystery. There are also suggestions that the seemingly
upright life led by Victorian men in the day is coupled with a lurid ‘secret’
life at night where at times even their heterosexual preferences are called
into question. Although not overtly articulated, novels such as Dr Jekyll
and Mr Hyde reveal a generally homosocial society whereby the fast bonding
of the men hints at something more than platonic friendship.
Secrets as a form of concealment also connote darkness and acts as
a means of subversion against the façade of the hypocritical Victorian
society which boasts a well-policed state with brightly-lit streets at
night, claiming the honourability of well-clothed individuals and the safety
of the private self, all which the gothic trope seeks to challenge.
(Kong Yuqi, 2006)
Sleep
Sleep is depicted in the gothic text to be a process or an activity
that forms a locus for perverted horrors to take shape and thrive in the
most subtle and monstrous of ways. Instead of being rendered as a harmless
pursuit that reinvigorates the body, soul and mind or a natural event that
follows the exertions of the day, it manifests itself in all its liminality
as a state of being that exposes the vulnerability of the individual to
supernatural forces and macabre influences beyond the his/her consciousness
or control. This subversive concept of sleep is played out both in Dracula
and Jekyll & Hyde. Lucy Westenra writes in her journal, “Oh the terrible
struggle that I have had against sleep…with such unknown horrors as it
has for me!”(143). Henry Jekyll recounts, in his narrative, how he went
to bed as the doctor but had awakened as the villainous Hyde (67). Sleep
not only becomes the medium for animating mysterious and arcane metamorphoses
but in a larger context symbolizes, through its unnatural affiliations
with the Undead and the fantastic, how the general malaise, repression
and unarticulated anxieties and fears of a society at a critical stage
of transition can only be expressed via the disruptions and distortions
of a natural procedure. Sleep, in the gothic, can only be restored to its
original, positive, non-threatening condition paradoxically through death
even though in its previous malevolent state it is inextricably tied to
death.
(Sherene Lobo, 2006)
Sin
One of the more subtle monstrosities produced by the Gothic interrogation
of the wealth and science obsessed Victorian era is the new forms Sin which
indicate a pervasive estrangement of Victorian society and its values with
God.
The Victorians, with their new found optimisms in
the Enlightenment and science created in its shadow countless possibilities
in which tenets of religious beliefs have been forgotten and betrayed.
Sin as explored in the Gothic is this very shadow.When Frankenstein creates
his monster, he manages to use the scientific advances of his age to displace
the creation role of God. Hence, Science as a possible road to hell is
exposed and explored in the Gothic. But religion as cast aside also manifests
itself in gestures like Harker’s skepticism of the gift of the Crucifix
which later brings him comfort. These sentiments are also most obvious
when Dr. Jekyll tries to rid himself from Sin; he no longer turns to religion
but to science and produces a monster who is the embodiment of his sin.
As for redemption, the church as an institution is usually absent, a mark
of Victorian skepticism, and characters like Mina Harker have to rely on
their own faith and belief for redemption. More often, the new forms of
Gothic sin that arise out of Victorian obsessions for knowledge and wealth
leave their pursuers in a self created hell on earth, tormented by their
monsters. The monsters of Sin no longer come from hell but from the hands
of man.
(Stephanie Chu, 2006)
Gothic Sublime
The concept of the sublime arguably carries varying associations
and connotations across different socio-cultural and historical periods.
However, the sublime can generally be defined as that which surpasses one’s
being, senses or understanding, or an experience that is and confers upon
one elements of the extraordinary. The use or depiction of the sublime,
with its socio-cultural specific associations and connotations, as subject
matter, landscape, or the personification of the sublime through characters
in gothic texts, can be self-reflexive and serves to interrogate and subvert
the very act of describing, representing or defining the sublime in gothic
narratives. This interrogation at the narrative level also implicates
and is facilitated at the thematic level through themes and gothic tropes
like doubling, containment, madness and the figure of the monster etc.
For instance, the monster in Frankenstein and the Count in Dracula,
are not only associated with the sublime landscapes but are also the ‘monstrous’
embodiment of the sublime, often associated with elements of the unknown
and are thus threatening and elusive. The attempt at and difficulty in
capturing these elusive characters by the other characters in the plots
provide an instance whereby the critique on the ironic attempt at representing
and ‘capturing’ the sublime (also the transcendental) in gothic texts is
facilitated.
The sublime is also prefigured in the urban settings of
certain gothic texts through elements of extreme lack or absence, like
silence, darkness and barrenness etc, embodied in the characters largely
at the psychological level, and further reflective of gothic themes and
tropes like indeterminacies, liminal space, madness and identities. For
instance, the indeterminable “deformity” and bestial brutality of
Hyde in The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and the seemingly
‘rational’ ‘madness’ of Renfield in Dracula, which questions the
boundaries of sanity and insanity and the assumed goodness of rationality.
The gothic sublime is thus also used to highlight or question larger implications
or issues such as representation, subjectivity, naming, categories,
identities and power, and provides platforms for analysis or critique also
at the psychological level. The gothic sublime evidently serves as a tool
to critique and reflect the issues and anxieties of the society in gothic
narratives.
(Lee Soo Pin, Pauline, 2004)
Gothic Sublime
Sublimity is a vital, integral part of the Gothic novel that embraces
a variety of historical practices and can be analyzed in political, religious,
ethical and natural contexts. There is no one single essence of the sublime,
as it slips away from the signification of language easily. Edmund Burke
famously pinned an idea of the sublime down to a device of terror that
awakens the faculties through suspense or dread. However, Gothic sublimity
is not merely instrumental as a repertoire of terrifying devices. It holds
symbolic resonance as external suspense is subordinated to the excesses
of the imagination and emotion.
Inherent in the Gothic Sublime, is the complex nature of pain and fear
unfolding alongside the psychological and cultural dimensions of terror.
It is Freud’s essay of “The Uncanny” that resonates with this notion of
the Gothic Sublime. The uncanny derives its terror from something strangely
familiar which defeats our efforts to separate ourselves from it. This
fear or terror, that the Gothic Sublime unleashes, is powerful as it is
not only interiorized within the self but unutterable as well. Words and
images grow radically unstable and meaning is continually questioned with
great psychological unease. The terror can be located at the very origin
of desire, where incest, homosexuality and rampant sexuality lay in waiting
to emerge. The Gothic Sublime hence releases into fiction, desires deeply
hidden, long suppressed and then forced into silence, greatly intensifying
the dangers of an uncontrollable release from restraint.
(Maureen Hoon, 2006)
Transference
Transference, originally a term coined by Freud to represent the relationship
between the analysand (patient) and the analyst, refers to the projecting
and redirecting of one’s unconscious self, feelings and desires (especially
those unconsciously retained from childhood which deals with core issues
of identity problems rather than with past traumatic incidents) onto another
being or object. The process of transference is a catharsis, and where
one’s unconscious desires and feelings are repressed, they can obtain release
through the action of repetition, which, in a psychoanalytic treatment,
these repeated actions and thoughts (which are unconscious) will then be
transferred onto the analyst.
In a literary text, transference may take 2 forms – 1) the author as
the ‘analysand’ projecting his unconscious desires and feelings unto his/her
characters on to the ‘analyst’ (who is the reader); and, 2) the characters
in the novel to other figures or objects in the novel.
In a gothic novel, transference manifests itself as the characters
in the novel project the unconscious fears (desires, anxieties) onto another
being, consciously making these fears or desires something almost alien
from themselves – something they would call the “Other”, yet not realising
that this “Other” is actually inherent in themselves.
For example, in Frankenstein, Victor’s feelings of hatred (or his unresolved
conflicts with his father), is transferred onto the figure of the monster,
who then outwardly expresses the hatred of father-figures in the novel.
The monster is thus a projection of Victor’s inner self.
However, the implication of transference is the indestructibility of
the unconscious and its fantasies, and hence total transference of one’s
unconscious desires can never occur. Hence, Victor and the monster become
doubles of each other.
(Michelle J.Y. Tiong, 2004)
Gothic transgression
Transgression is central to the Gothic because it serves as a means
for writers to interrogate existing categories, limits and anxieties within
nineteenth century English society. By transgressing social limits the
Gothic “reinforces the values and necessity of restoring or defining limits”
through the presentment of the horrific outcomes of transgression (Botting,
7). Most often, these transgressions reflect and refract current anxieties
of the age as a way to deal and contain them. Anxieties regarding the dissolution
of gender differences, due to the emergence of the New Woman and the aesthete;
regarding the possibility of devolution and degeneration in man; and regarding
fears of the working class - a repercussion of the French Revolution- are
dealt with singly or in overlapping ways. Consider how in Dracula sexual
differences are “ef(face)ed” by the trope of the vampiric mouth which
is both “penetrator” and “orifice” (Craft, 95); which is further complicated
by the essentially male act of penetration to the neck by male and female
vampires alike. The New woman (who is gender ambiguous in being biologically
female, yet desiring masculinity) seems to be parodied horrifically here.
The New Woman is further parodied in the vampiric Lucy whose maternal instincts
are reversed (with her feeding on children, instead), promiscuous (with
multiple husband’s whose bloods are coursing through her) and blatant sexuality
(in seducing Arthur). The threatening figure of the New Woman as Lucy,
and the sexual ambiguity represented by all the vampires, are subdued and
destroyed, vicariously for the reader. However such overt aims are problematised
by the numerous Gothic works that lack reassuring closures, presenting
their own narrators as unreliable and questionable, and revealing the covert
monstrosity in mainstream society and the aristocrats (- that leaves the
reader more insecure than not. The Gothic writers themselves seem to be
unlikely proponents to restore societal limits and boundaries – since they,
very often, were transgressors of those very boundaries (e.g. Shelley,
Wilde, etc.). Thus, although Gothic transgression did interrogate current
issues, its aims and intended effects were ambivalent.
Botting, Fred. Gothic. London and New York: Routledge (1996)
Craft, Christopher. ‘Kiss Me with Those Red Lips’: Gender and Inversion
in Bram Stoker's Dracula. Dracula : Bram Stoker ed. Glennis Byron. Basingstoke,
Hants.: Macmillan Press, 1999.
(Grace Dong Enping, 2004)
Vampire
In Gothic literature, the figure of the vampire may most significantly
be read as a symbol of variable fluidity and volatile mutability. Most
obviously, as a shape-shifter, the Count in Bram Stoker’s Dracula possesses
the ability to metamorphose into various animals, for instance, rats and
wolves. He is also highly mobile and able to move both across geographical
boundaries and within the country with effortless ease. In addition, this
transformative power reflects his liminal position as one who, while crossing
boundaries and stepping over established thresholds, also occupies both
spaces simultaneously. For instance, as the Undead, he is neither dead
nor alive, neither human nor inhuman, because he is all these. Furthermore,
it remains questionable as to whether he is to be seen as a creature of
human devolution because of his bestial appetites or as superior to man
because of his supernatural strength and abilities. Thus, as a figure which
resists strict classification and definition, he is viewed as a terrifying
monstrosity because he cannot be categorically pinned down. Put in context,
the obsession with boundaries and borders reflects the pervading sense
of unease and instability with the invasion of foreign elements into England,
be it capital, immigrants, or religion, brought about by changes in Victorian
society. The vampire is thus indicative of the deep anxieties in the dissolution
of distinctions in class, gender, race, and nationality underlying the
nineteenth century, all of which ultimately threaten the self. Indeed,
if the vampire is mutable and indefinable, the self, defined by opposition
to the former, also becomes difficult to locate. As such, the vampire critically
interrogates and challenges boundaries between self and other by highlighting
the instability of identity in the vampire and, by extension, in the self.
(Irene Chong, 2006)
VAMPIRISM / VAMPYRISM
Vampirism is an important and popular facet in Gothic
Literature. The theory Vampirism emanates from the root word Vampire. The
basic definition for Vampire is a “corpse that sucks blood for the purpose
of resisting decomposition”. Vampires belong to the myth in today’s world.
There are many connotations that belong to the notion vampires. They are
seen as something miraculous, a result of imagination, and as the masterpiece
of the work of the devil. Besides there are believes that vampires are
actually people who die from plague, poison, hydrophobia, drunkenness and
any epidemical malady. These people were thought to have the chances “to
return” as their blood coagulates with more difficulty. Besides, some of
them were buried alive as there was the fear of the spreading of the disease
in those times.
Vampirism, in Gothic literature, was introduced
by Sheridan Le Fanu, in his short novel “Carmilla”. The protagonist
vampire in Carmilla is a female- a vampire countess. But vampirism came
into heightened highlight after the publication of Bram Stoker’s “Dracula”.
Unlike “Carmilla”, the setting for Dracula is in Transylvania (or Wallachia),
and the Dracula himself is a male. The central for the character is derived
from Voycode (Prince) Dracula, a notorious, fifteenth century warrior who
claimed war against the Turks, also well known as Vlad the Impaler. Consequently,
the name Dracula, in the Wallachian language, also means Devil.
Vampirism, too introduces the idea of immortality
in literature-the idea of never-ending life in the expense of others. It
is an unique believe in after life and in the rejuvenating powers of blood
that produces or creates a vampire. Thus the dead have to get blood to
sustain their immortal after life, either through sacrifice, where blood
is offered to them or they take it themselves from living mortals. Blood,
is recreated as a gothic element, an important aspect of Vampirism. In
all literature works touching on Vampirism, the element of blood is rampantly
established. Besides, vampires are always portrayed as to be creatures
of the night, pale and ghastly. They are sensitive to the broad daylight,
despise the smell of garlic and are sensitive to holy emblems that belong
to the Catholic Church.
Modern age have made the concept Vampirism even
more bolder, vampire-characters are romanticized and cast upon new light,
where, there are more often than not, stereotyped as ardent lovers pursuing
lost lovers or Evil in quest of the world by being against the Good. Besides,
written literature by famous writers like Ann Rice, we have movies like
“Interview with the Vampire” and “Blade”, to name a few, to bring forth
the idea of Vampirism.
“The Gothic and Romantic era was naturally drawn
to the mysteries of life and death, satanic influences, and the perverse
capacity of lovers to draw the life-force one from the other. Before the
end of the 18th century a number of poets – Burger, Goethe, Coleridge –
had explored vampiric themes…..over the course of next twenty years vampirism
enjoyed an artistic vogue that enrolled the most illustrious of the Romantics,….Keats,
Shelley and Byron…” (The Origins of Dracula, Clive Leatherdale)
An excerpt from Lord Byron’s “The Giaour”
But first on earth, as Vampyre sent,
Thy corpse shall from its tomb be rent;
Then ghastly haunt thy native place,
And suck the blood of thy entire race.
(Kavitha Kaliappan, 2004)
Vampirism
Gothic is a parasite. It manifests as a mutant third limb—hideous,
deformed, drawing attention to its own strangeness; its feeds off the body
of its parent text (its host), be that a novel, a city, or a prevalent
current of thought. The elements found throughout Gothic literature
predominantly perform a subversive function, which aim to undermine the
Self, the parent, to which Gothic relates as a negative image of, its inverse.
The process of vampirism is viewed as being debilitating to the host, which
will eventually be leeched of its essence and then destroyed. Yet
the central tenet of vampirism can be approached, not as residing upon
the draining of the host, but as a total dependence upon it. Gothic
reproduces itself as if in a mirror, revealing its contingent nature, its
reliance on the existence of a positive body to which it can attach.
To recall the doppelganger effect, Gothic, as reflection, cannot exist
without its host; the moment the host steps away from that mirror, so too
does Gothic, and its significances, disappear. The Gothic genre,
therefore, cannot be self-sustaining, but inextricably an extension of
its parent—something attached, following after, indebted to. The
textual vampirism of Gothic narratives is frequently re-enacted within
its motifs, self-reflexively (or perhaps self-consciously) replaying, within
the unearthing of its host’s anxieties, the conditions of its own dependence.
In Jekyll and Hyde, for example, Hyde grows out of Jekyll and lives off
the doctor’s income. Yet the threat of Hyde’s domination of Jekyll
only results in the destruction of the pair, as Jekyll, perceiving Hyde’s
power, is driven to the final resort of suicide to avoid being overcome
(an alternative reading of this would be that Jekyll, in trying to expel
Hyde, recognises his attempts to be futile and kill himself in order to
destroy his negative image). Frankenstein and his monster are another
pair: both are bound by the desire to eliminate the other; yet the monster’s
hate for its creator is so closely tied in with its love (indeed, its very
reason for existence, whether driven by one emotion or the other, nevertheless
revolve around the person of Frankenstein) that it delivers himself into
the inferno along with the body of its victim.
(Low Yi Qing, 2006)
Violence
Violence, like over-determined symbols in Gothic literature, functions
as much as an act of social interrogation as it is an act of affirmation.
In both Frankenstein and Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, strict social mores and
policing that prompt the disastrous, transgressive reactions of repressed
selves are manifested in the physical violence wrought by Frankenstein’s
and Dr Jekyll’s doubles, the monster and Mr Hyde. Here, violence also highlights
class anxieties where the repressed working class, like Frankenstein’s
self-educated monster, rebels violently against social masters like Frankenstein.
Human superficiality that incites Frankenstein’s monster’s violence also
operates to reflect the monstrosity in society itself.
Apart from interrogating social norms, scientific advancement and its
monstrous power, building on the Promethean over-reacher theme, are also
examined in its production of violent figures and emotional violence, like
that experienced by Frankenstein and Dr Lanyon after witnessing what science
can achieve. Here, gothic atavism of regression alongside material and
scientific progress is manifested in the figures of Jekyll and Hyde, where
the latter’s regression is demonstrated in his ape-like appearance and,
more significantly, in his disregard of human moral codes—his violence.
Yet, while violence undermines and questions the adequacies of law, it
also serves to affirm social codes. The violence of staking in Dracula,
for instance, acts as a social cleansing ritual of removing figures that
threaten social instability and miscegenation. Here, the violence of staking
Lucy, as is the mutilation of Elizabeth in Frankenstein, also takes on
phallic terms to affirm masculinity in an age of increasing sexual anxieties.
(Sophia Koh, 2006)
Gothic Wasteland
Gothic narratives often play out amidst the most blighted of
settings. The barrenness and harshness of these primal landscapes often
depicts allegorically the spiritual impoverishment and internal desolation
that many of the characters of these novels experience. The wasteland of
the gothic novel is the ugly sister of the civilized urban cityscape, lacking
even the rustic charm of rural, pastoral land. Within the city, civility
and the hierarchy of social order prevail, while in the wasteland no such
laws and norms govern life, which grows indiscriminately and in unforeseeable
ways. It is altogether unwholesome and inimical to civilized human life,
which often visibly distorts and reverts to base primal instinct while
it resides there. Wild and untamed, the wasteland suggests regressive superstition
in its lack of civilization, defying penetration by the reasoning mind.
Prehistoric dwellings mark Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Grimpen Mire in The
Hound of the Baskervilles; once the abode of savage Neolithic man, it now
plays host to gypsies and an escaped convict, creatures living on the fringes
of society, the civilized man’s other.
Where the urban setting is associated with
life and mobility, the gothic wasteland presents its opposites – it is
filled with ever-present danger and death, while its untamed bounds restrict
rather than facilitate travel. In Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, the bleak
Arctic landscape threatens to freeze Robert Walton’s ship in place – death
literally by stasis. Likewise, the blasted Grimpen Mire around the Baskerville
estate in the The Hound of the Baskervilles entraps travelers and animals
in sticky mud, into which they sink to their deaths. Arctic blizzards and
rolling fog respectively also occur in these areas, extending the gothic
trope of obscurity to the land itself, waylaying the unwary and concealing
misdeeds. Treacherous and inhospitable, gothic wastelands represent Nature
and by extension human nature in crisis, or in a state of infirmity or
insanity.
(Kenneth Tan, 2006)
Weather:
Weather plays an important function in gothic literature, and remains
one of the keys in decoding the inner landscape of the protagonists. Often
present in gothic novels not only as a form of sympathetic background,
certain elements of weather are typically used to mirror and magnify the
feelings of the protagonist, to establish moods, and to underscore the
action of the story. For instance, the use of fog within the gothic novel
is a convention often used to obscure objects by reducing visibility and
changing the outward appearances of truth; and storms, when they make their
appearance, frequently accompany important events and characters. Bad weather,
in particular, is often associated with the supernatural, as well as being
the birthing landscape of the imagination. Storms are perceived as harbingers
of evil, and often present both a reflection and refraction of the inner
self of the protagonist, an externalization of internal fears and conflict.
Weather can also function as a site of displacement of fears, when they
are projected onto the storm itself. In Le Fanu’s novel Uncle Silas, the
main protagonist, Maud’s fears for her future after her father’s death
are both underscored by the approaching storm, and also displaced onto
it.
Weather has also acquired a certain predictability in its interpretation
in gothic literature; a feature that can easily be, and is often parodied
in gothic works. There is the sense that readers are habitually lured into
reading the weather as codes signifying the protagonist’s inner landscape,
and are ultimately unable to resist assuming heavily overdetermined meanings
in the relationship between the weather and the inner self, thereby illustrating
the gothic nature of the text by tempting one to oversimplify its reading,
and yet simultaneously contributing to the destabilizing sense of gothic
unease by having its meaning perceived through a different set of codes
that are ultimately arbitrary.
(Chang Keng Mun, 2004)