Gothic Criticism

“At the heart of the Gothic text is the tension provided by the possible violation of innocence – the concept of ‘virtue in distress’ Robert Kidd

“In crossing the borders between East and West he undoes cultural distinctions between civilisation and barbarity, reason and irrationality, home and abroad.” Botting

‘Gothic fictions seemed to promote vice and violence, giving free reign to selfish ambitions and sexual desires beyond the prescriptions of law or familial duty’ Botting

‘Illegitimate power and violence is not only put on display but threatens to consume the world of civilised and domestic values’ Botting

“Categorised forms of deviance and abnormality explained criminal behaviour as pathological return of animalistic, instinctual habits.

” Botting

“The fact that the ‘foreign’ could exist in the reader’s own neighbourhood made it all the more frightening” Robert Kidd

“Dracula uncannily straddles the border between life and death” Botting

“Gothic texts tend to be about transgression, overstepping boundaries and entering a realm of the unknown” Robert Kidd

“Relations between real and fantastic, scared or profane, supernatural and natural, past and present, civilised and barbaric, rational and fanciful, remain crucial to the Gothic dynamic of limit and transgression” Botting

“Gothic castles, villains and ghosts, already made clichéd and formulaic by popular imitation, ceased to evoke terror or horror.” Botting

“Good and evil are similarly articulated as the line separating culture, progress and civilisation from barbarity, primitivism and regression.” Botting

“terror grows out of suspense while horror produces disgust” Botting

“In many Gothic novels the castle represents a threatening, sexually rapacious masculine world in which women are trapped and persecuted.” Pete Bunten

“The world of the castle in Gothic Fiction is thus a world of sharply contrasting light and dark” Pete Bunten

“the castle seems to represent both physically and metaphorically the darkness at the heart of the Gothic” Pete Bunten

“the images of locked and unlocked doors within the Gothic castle often signify the sexual vulnerability of women” Pete Bunten

The Castle is a “necessary accompaniment to terror” Botting

“A common feature of many Gothic castles is that they seem to distort perception, to cause some slippage between what is natural and what is human made; they act as unreliable lenses through which to view history and from the other side of which may emerge terrors only previously apprehended in a dream.” Botting

The castle “may represent authority that is either reassuring or fearful, human triumph or defeat, female subjugation or triumph, physical and psychological constraint or freedom” Botting

“The origins of the vampire were explained as fears of the plague, thought, since the Middles Ages, to have emanated from the East.” Botting

“Out of the collective fragments of the text a new masculine image is assembled in opposition to the dark, inverted figure of pure evil and negativity.” Botting

“In a world which, since the eighteenth century, has become increasingly secular, the absence of a fixed religious framework as well as changing social and political conditions has meant that gothic writing, and its reception, has undergone significant transformations” Botting

“Her chastity was the object of the villain’s desire” Robert Kidd

“Stoker’s novel subordinates feminine sexuality to a masculine perspective in which women serve as objects of exchange and competition between men” Botting

“Usually male, the individual is outcast, part victim, part villain” Botting

“The vampire theme signals the barbarities that result from human vanity and scientific illusions.” Botting

“Dracula is more than a Gothic villain – he is both villain and ghostly diabolical agent whose magic and power cannot be reduced” Botting

“The vampire is constructed as absolute object, the complete antithesis of subjectivity, agency and authority.” Botting

“Dracula feeds off prevailing cultural anxieties concerning corruption, sexuality and spirit.” Botting

‘the monster is something to be shown, something that serves to demonstrate and to warn…monsters were interpreted either as signs of divine anger or as portents of impending disasters…to serve an increasingly moral function.” Botting

‘as well as becoming the subject rather than the object of the narrative, the modern vampire, rather than being solitary like Stoker’s Count, desires companionship…Auerbach argues, early vampires cultivate an insidious intimacy with humans, and it is only Stoker’s Dracula who breaks with this tradition, becoming aloof, alien, cold and impersonal’ Punter

‘The solitary vampire, often gives way to a community, and this process of socialization humanizes vampires further as they become motivated not only by hunger or the desire for power,but also by such feelings as jealousy or fear’ Punter

“The three female vampires seem, unlike Harker, to be unconstrained by the physical restraints of the castle: (“they simply seemed to fade into the rays of the moonlight”)” Botting

“The female vampires in Dracula display the effects of desire and horror attendant on the dangerous doubleness of sexuality.” Botting

“One of the main objects of anxiety was the ‘New woman’ who, in her demand for economic, sexual and political independence, was seen as a threat to conventionally sexualised divisions between domestic and social roles.’ Botting

“Their decadence, nocturnal existence and indiscriminate desires distinguish vampires as a particularly modern sexual threat to cultural mores and taboos” Botting

“they are modern visions of epidemic contagions from the past, visited on the present in a form that, like venereal disease, enters the home only after (sexual) invitation.” Botting

“Temptation and Transgression are the central motifs of the Gothic” Robert Kidd

“The mirror that Dracula composes for them becomes a mirror of male desire, of what men, in the 1890s, have to become in order to survive” Botting

“Uncertainties about the nature of power, law, society, family and sexuality dominate Gothic fiction” Botting

“the rational world is left far behind, resason no longer rules.” Kidd

“The fluid exchanges present a perverse sexuality, unnatural in the way it exceeds fixed gender roles and heterosexual distinctions.” Botting

“a novel that indulges the Victorian male imagination, particularly regarding the topic of female sexuality”

In Dracula “the true ‘terrors’ lie in the awakening of female sexuality” The Threat of Female Sexual Expression

“Gothic becomes a fiction of unconscious desire, a release of repressed energies and anti-social fantasies.” Botting

“The fusion of scientific knowledge and religious values is made possible by the demonic threat of Dracula: his diabolical powers and primitive energy, leading to a ‘baptism of blood’ for his victims” Botting

‘the vampire as monstrous, evil and other serves to guarantee the existence of good, reinforcing the formally dichotomized structures of belief’ Punter

”whether in appearance or behaviour, monsters function to define and construct the politics of the ‘normal’…they police the boundaries of the human, pointing to those lines that cant be crossed’ Punter

‘limits and boundaries can therefore be reinstated as the monster is despatched, good is distinguished from evil and self from other.’ Punter

“The sense of the castle as a place of safety, one of its original historical functions, is thus never wholly lost in Gothic Fiction” Pete Bunten

“Gothic texts were in many ways, a reaction against the rational discourse that market the literature and philosophy of the Age of Reason” Robert Kidd

Gothic texts “became a way of subverting the establishment” Robert Kidd

“Writers of the eighteenth century were obsessed with distinguishing good from evil, truth from falsehood, and reason from passion” Andrew Henningfield

‘one of the most significant shifts in the movement from folk-lore to literature is the vampire’s transformation from peasant to aristocrat…such a shift immediately opens up the possibilities for political readings.’ Punter

‘Stoker’s books, for example have imperial connections in what one might take to be the ‘conventional’ sense of empire- that is, as relation to what Victorians would have seen as ‘far-flung corners of the earth” Punter

‘first invites or admits a monster, then entertains and is entertained by monstrosity for some extended duration, until in its closing pages it expels or repudiates the monster and all the disruptions that he/she/it/brings’ Byron

“the vampire functions to police the boundaries between ‘normal’ and ‘deviant’ sexuality, with the narrative voice firmly positioned on the side of the ‘normal” Punter