Gothic Fiction Research Articles

Ciência e moralidade vitorianas em o Médico e o monstro, de Robert Louis Stevenson (1886)

ABSTRACT This article analyzes how Scottish writer Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894) depicts the relationship between science and morality (secular or religious) in his 1886 novella The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. For this purpose, I analyze the setting choice (London) and some characteristics of late Victorian Gothic fiction that constitute the negative aesthetics of which Stevenson’s characters are formed. Then, I analyze how the negative aesthetic juxtaposes with an order that is both scientific and moralist in a cultural context in which the reading public is obsessed with crime. Eventually, I discuss the theories of 19th-century philosophers and scientists, such as Herbert Spencer (1820-1903), Cesare Lombroso (1835-1909), and Francis Galton (1822-1911), in an attempt to understand Stevenson’s novella from an allegedly scientific point of view. I conclude that Hyde/Jekyll was “destined” to fail since both late Victorian science and morality were prone to condemn the “unfit”.

The Tales of Bluebeard’s Wives: Carmen Maria Machado’s Intertextual Storytelling in In the Dream House and “The Husband Stitch”

This paper examines the gothic fairy tale in Carmen Maria Machado’s memoir In the Dream House and short story “The Husband Stitch” with a focus on Bluebeard’s insistent presence and the interweaving of reality, gothic horror, and fairy tale. In the memoir, Machado restages her experience of queer intimate partner violence in the form of a gothic fairy tale as “The Queen and the Squid”, reminiscent of the tale of Bluebeard’s latest wife. By including gothic fairy-tale elements in the autobiographical text, Machado blurs the boundaries between the fictional and non-fictional realm, between her story and that of Bluebeard’s latest wife, thereby rewriting the tale for a queer context. The annotation of the memoir using Stith Thompson’s Motif-Index of Folk-Literature further superimposes the fairy tale onto Dream House. Machado’s short story “The Husband Stitch” is a gender-aware inversion of “Bluebeard”. The reappearance of the tale throughout Machado’s work reveals the persistence of abusive behavioral patterns in relationships to the present day. Machado’s intertextual storytelling blurs the lines between autobiographical events and the tale of Bluebeard’s latest wife, creating a shared narrative universe of experiences of women who have dealt with their own iteration of Bluebeard.

Up the river, into the dark: textual play and dystopian gloom in Joca Reiners Terron’s A morte e o meteoro

The dystopian character of Joca Reiners Terron’s A morte e o meteoro (2019) is indissociable from its critique of colonialism. But while the novel makes frequent references to the violent methods of exploitation that characterized American colonization, it mostly relies on allusions to different literary traditions—including gothic fiction, the adventure novel, and science fiction—in its depiction of colonialism. The dialogue with Heart of Darkness plays a significant role in A morte e o meteoro, which to a large extent is a critical rereading of Conrad’s novella. This article examines how this appropriation of textual and cultural paradigms shapes the dystopian outlook of the novel, while also offering alternatives to the hopelessness that defines its fictional world.

The Interior Other

Representations of monstrosity in literature reveal the cultural tensions of specific historical periods, as collective social fears become embodied by creatures intended to disturb their audiences. Gothic novels of the late Victorian Era rely on these representations of darkness in society, and the different monsters created by Victorian authors reflect various views of social norms, particularly in relation to gender. This essay focuses on Bram Stoker’s sexually threatening vampires in Dracula and Robert Louis Stevenson’s physically repulsive representation of the duality of humankind in The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. Portrayals of monsters in the late nineteenth century were not limited to literature, but also evident in visual works, such as Aubrey Beardsley’s renderings of Salomé for Oscar Wilde’s publication of a play by the same name. While Stoker’s engagement with monstrosity villainizes female sexual subjectivity, Stevenson’s depiction of corruption questions socially performative masculinity. An analysis of Beardsley’s images emphasizes the potential for sexually subjective female monsters like those in Dracula to contradict social gender norms much like Stevenson’s representation of Mr Hyde, rather than perpetuate the sexual repression of women as Stoker’s novel does. However, the exoticized nature of these drawings also highlights the association between imperial ideologies and representations of gendered monstrosity which both Stoker and Stevenson exhibit as they express anxieties about the colonial other in their texts. Studying these works allows insight into the connections between gender, sexual normativity, and the colonial other that continue to be relevant in contemporary media.

Malaise: a journey through the Gothic fictions of Daniela Edburg

This article examines how Mexican artist Daniela Edburg has been using Gothic idioms to raise awareness of both personal and environmental ailments. For over two decades, Edburg has combined digital photography and textiles to create fictional settings in which women are depicted in domestic spaces or natural landscapes in bizarre situations. Some of her characters are attacked by monsters, while others appear in a state of escapism, and many have encounters with death or disease. In this paper, I examine the connections between Edburg’s art and Gothic tropes including the uncanny, the return of the dead, madness and disease, intrusions into domestic space, the clash of old and new, and the yearning for reconnection with nature. The text begins with an analysis of her most recent project, Malaise, which alludes to Frankenstein and crystallizes core concerns that have persisted throughout her career. Later, I examine prior series by the artist to demonstrate how gothic traits have always been present in Edburg’s work. Using a gothic style, the artist has constantly reflected on how humans relate to the natural world through the artificial, as well as the consequences of this attitude toward life, which has led us to a dystopian future.

Representations of Terror and Horror in the Frontispieces to Thomas and Robert Hughes’s Gothic Chapbooks

ABSTRACT Chapbooks are versatile print media that, more than any other print form, made available a wide variety of texts intended for popular reading to a broad and diverse readership. Gothic chapbooks or bluebooks, in particular, occupied an intermediary position between expensive editions of belles lettres and cheaply produced ballads and other literary ephemera. Adapting and appropriating genre conventions and narrative strategies, they both capitalised on and further contributed to the popularity of the Gothic genre in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. To date, however, little scholarly attention has been devoted to the frontispiece illustrations included in these chapbooks. This article examines the frontispieces to the Gothic bluebooks issued by Thomas and Robert Hughes in 1807 and 1808. Exploring the multifunctionality of the illustrations, it explores the ways in which they developed visual interpretations of Gothic horror and terror, generated metageneric reflections, and participated in a visual culture shared across different media networks. Functioning as a critical access point for readers, the frontispieces represented an integral part of the paratextual framing of the bluebook texts, generating meaning and affecting the Gothic reading experience.

“It made her age hard to guess”: Narrating the dynamics of aging and gender through Victorian Gothic archetypes in Susan Hill’s The Woman in Black

Abstract Although Susan Hill has become a prolific writer of ghost narratives in the last decades, it was at a particularly momentous stage of her life as a woman writer that she published The Woman in Black (1983), which is considered her first ghost novel. Evoking the Victorian past, The Woman in Black engages intertextually with Victorian novels within the Gothic genre. The character of the Woman in Black comprises features pertaining to different Victorian Gothic archetypes, such as the ghost, the vampire, and the double. Some of the traits pertaining to these literary archetypes echoed Victorian anxieties about aging that are recovered and reinterpreted in Hill’s novel. Furthermore, in analogy with a Gothic romance, the encounter between the narrator as a young man, Arthur Kipps, and a spectral aging woman, the Woman in Black, unleashes the hero’s process of coming of age, which he recollects in his old age as he is writing his narrative. Narratological features pertaining to the Gothic genre, like the use of a frame narrative that blends past and present, underscore the dynamics of aging, since processes of interrupted aging and premature aging disrupt the boundaries that conventionally distinguish life stages. This article approaches Hill’s The Woman in Black as a contemporary ghost novel that evokes and subverts Victorian discourses of aging and gender, at the same time that, from a contemporary perspective, it vindicates the figure of the Victorian fallen woman as an aging mother.

Mistification

We live in a world increasingly dominated by technology, and there are many technological advances that we frequently use about which we know very little. Among them, one we know mostly through metaphor stands out: “cloudification”. Metaphors play a central role in our understanding of the concepts and ideas that present themselves, revealing for the first time something that was already there. In this way, we propose the term mistification as a more accurate expression of the current technocratic/technological status quo for which the terms “cloud” and “cloudification” are used. The proposed term – a neologism – conveys elements of Gothic horror which, we hope, precisely capture the current experience of end-users of the cloud. Using New Dark Age (Bridle, 2018) as a point of departure, we propose an analogy between end-users of the cloud with players in a Gothic horror role-playing game, namely the Ravenloft campaign setting of Dungeons & Dragons. Similarly to players in a Gothic horror game, end-users remain ignorant and helpless against all too powerful technocratic/technological giants and their pursuits. This article adds elements belonging to a horror role-playing game campaign setting to a wider cross-disciplinary discussion regarding human-machine interaction.

Blue Chambers, Bluebooks, and Contes Bleus: Gothic Terror and Female Deviance in Nineteenth-Century Adaptations of ‘Bluebeard’

With its suspenseful atmosphere, mysterious and murderous male protagonist, and magical objects, it is hardly surprising that Charles Perrault’s conte bleu ‘La Barbe bleue’ (1697) was the inspiration for numerous Gothic tales in the nineteenth century. Some of these adaptations placed Gothic devices such as the representation of the terror experienced by Bluebeard’s latest wife within the broader nineteenth-century cultural discourse on female deviance, and its relations with masculine authority and dominance. By removing from the tale Perrault’s warning against female curiosity and imprudence and focusing on the wife’s feelings of fear and terror, these adaptations amplify the intrinsic Gothicism of the Bluebeard story, thus providing the female protagonist with a psychological depth that includes, as I demonstrate in this study, a display of a variety of abnormal behaviours. In these Gothic adaptations, the terror experienced by Bluebeard’s wife serves as a springboard for the representation of psychological and nervous disorders commonly diagnosed in the nineteenth century such as hysteria, monomania, female depravity, and masochism. Showing the interculturality and intermediality of these themes, this essay analyses rewritings of Perrault’s ‘Bluebeard’ from nineteenth-century Britain, France, and the United States, including Gothic bluebooks, poems, dramas, and short stories.

Degenerative Doctoring: Coercion, Experimentation and Ethics in Arthur Machen’s Gothic Horror

In “The Inmost Light” and The Great God Pan Arthur Machen demonstrates a medicalised sexism through unethical human experimentation performed on women by doctors who experiment no matter the cost. In Machen’s stories, the sensationalism is meant to create a feeling of horror and disgust that hinges on the cruelty the public had begun to associate with experimental medical science. The narratives also engage with nineteenth-century perspectives on degeneration, women, and rape. Machen’s use of a sexualised rape metaphor dehumanises women and retains a gendered doctor-patient relationship. In light of this gendered relationship, this article considers Machen’s use of elements drawn from the Gothic in relation to the depiction of medicalised sexism and medical ethics in two pieces of his popular fiction.

The Female Anxiety Embodied in the Gothic Novel: Frankenstein

Female Gothic Fiction - Frankenstein is a revealing tale of female anxiety and terror that not only has a distinctly Gothic sublime appeal, but also boldly reflects Shelley's female anxiety brought on by authorship and family ties through the absence of female discourse, the metaphor of the monster as a woman, and the appropriation of female fertility by men.

Visions of Red Riding Hood: Transformative Bodies in Contemporary Adaptations

Gothic and sexual elements are embedded within both Charles Perrault’s and the Brothers Grimm’s tellings of “Little Red Riding Hood”. When popular culture turned to fairy tales from the late 20th century forward, reimagining them as gothic tales for adults, “Little Red Riding Hood” provided a particularly rich setting. In particular, these adaptations exploited the false binaries within these tales while making more visible the sexual abuse and recovery encoded in the narratives. This essay will first explore the particular gothic qualities within this tale, as well as the shapeshifting nature of the four characters. After establishing how the figure of Red, as well as her motifs, are key to ensemble fairy-tale narratives, I will examine adaptations that directly explore the sexuality and agency of a young woman, as she resists both predators and her family legacy. However, the last section will note that monstrosity, like victimization, can be resisted. Overall, this essay interrogates contemporary film and television adaptations of this tale, with a particular interest in the messages of recovery and agency in these new versions.

GOTHIC FEATURES IN KEVIN RYAN’S NOVEL “VAN HELSING”

The Gothic novel, which appeared in English literature in the late XVIII and early XIX centuries, influenced the works of outstanding writers of all subsequent periods. The description of supernatural elements in the Gothic novel filled the reader with horror and fear. The genre of the Gothic novel, known in some sources as the "black novel", is widely developed, primarily in English literature. Gothic novels play an important role not only in English but also in world literature. They had a significant impact on the further development of many literary movements, both in Europe and in other parts of the world.

Diagnostic Logic and Forensic Reading: The Case ofWieland

AbstractAt the end of the eighteenth century, professional and lay audiences alike negotiated the lines between mental health and disorder, questioning whether criminal behavior, for example, laid within medicine’s jurisdiction. This essay examines the role of literature in developing a “diagnostic logic” that trained readers in evolving forms of mental surveillance. First, it shows how physicians like Benjamin Rush relied on popular and literary sources to create new diagnostic categories, citing newspaper crime reports and Shakespearean plays as medical evidence and encouraging readers to interpret familiar behavior through the lens of pathology. Next, I turn to Charles Brockden Brown’s Wieland (1798) to demonstrate how the novel’s suspicion of empiricism could paradoxically heighten readers’ desire to sort and predict behavior. Soliciting readers’ interest through scenes of gothic horror, the novel concludes by urging readers to apply their diagnostic skills in more mundane social settings. Moreover, unlike Rush’s straightforward assessment of pathology’s mitigating impact on accountability, Brown’s novel invites readers to reach their own conclusions on the ethical implications of diagnosis. Ultimately, I argue, texts like Wieland did not simply work alongside medical tracts to authorize the surveillance of an increasing number of pathologized behaviors, but deepened readers’ engagement in doing so.

An Analysis of Gothic Literature: Spatial Fears in Suat Derviş’s Novels

Suat Derviş is one of the important writers of Turkish Literature in the Republican Period. She has works in such different genres as a columnist, short story, translation and novel. She is often associated with social realism. However, gothic themes were found in her first novels. Sin, revenge, death, suicide, black spirits, bloody murder, and the seizure of the soul by the devil are the common themes and events of her novels. Places such as graves, hell, mysterious mansions, dark rooms and undergrounds were generally accompanied by night, lightning, wind, and autumn. Fantastic events and imaginary people created an atmosphere of fear and tension.
 The study aims to reveal the characteristics of gothic literature and how the place is handled in Suat Derviş’s novels Kara Kitap, Ne Bir Ses Ne Bir Nefes, Buhran Gecesi, Fatma’nın Günahı, Onu Bekliyorum, Onları Ben Öldürdüm. The study also intends to examine the effect of the space phenomena in creating the gothic atmosphere. In the novels, rural areas, graves, mysterious rooms and objects, hell, and scary and dark places have been identified and subjected to a categorical classification.

‘A Poem Made Flesh’: Necromancing the Sovereignty Goddess in Emma Donoghue’s Hood

This essay explores the role of the sovereignty goddess in Emma Donoghue’s Hood (1995) and its protagonist’s efforts to come to terms with the death of her newly deceased girlfriend. Taking its impetus from Donoghue’s self-characterization as a literary ‘grave robber’, this essay examines how Hood’s protagonist, Pen, necromances the sovereignty goddess in an effort to produce and legitimize a recognizable lesbian subject in late twentieth-century Ireland. Framing Donoghue’s queer, feminist engagement with the goddess in relation to Mikhail Bakhtin’s theorization of the ‘chronotope’ – a narratological device that expresses a novel’s interfused time and space – this essay illustrates how Pen’s posthumous re-construction of her partner, Cara, comes to function as an anthropomorphic chronotope, whose body delineates the temporal, geographical, and generic boundaries of the novel. At the same time, drawing on Kristevan notions of abjection, it also traces how the simulacrum of Cara’s corpse decays across the novel, and explores the implications of this dissolution on the viability of the queer sovereignty mode the novel envisages. Refiguring the novel as a gothic tale about lesbian love, death, and grief, this essay demonstrates how Hood deploys an abject sovereignty goddess to both deconstruct the nightmare of Ireland’s social and cultural history, and produce inchoate, utopian daydreams for the nation’s future. In doing so, it argues that Hood performs a post-mortem on both Cara’s memory and the sovereignty tradition itself, resurrecting the goddess to mourn the Irish canon’s hetero-patriarchal sovereignty tradition, even as it facilitates the necromantic conversion of Ireland into a queer nation.

Feminist Gothic: Anonymity and intersectionality of oppression in Eva Figes'sThe Tenancy

AbstractThe Gothic genre has historically been adopted by women writers to express their subversive gender views. InThe Tenancy, Figes depicts the systematic oppression of the patriarchal society against women during the latter half of the twentieth century. She also revises the traditional Gothic topos of “oppression” in terms of three aspects: victim, intersectionality, and the source of oppression. Female victims no longer hold traditional gender values; they are new women who are oppressed for their nonconformity. This novel also shows that, with the development of technology and urbanization, patriarchal oppression has become more anonymous and more systematic, during which process gender and class parameters intersect with each other. Figes's revision upon the “oppression” topos reveals a more revolutionary insight than most Gothic novels in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. As a result,The Tenancymarks a significant transition from the female Gothic to the feminist Gothic.

Failed Heterotopias: The Postcolonial Gothic in Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things, J. M. Coetzee’s Disgrace, and Anna Burns’s Milkman

‘Failed Heterotopias’ reads three contemporary postcolonial gothic novels, Anna Burns's Milkman (2019), J. M. Coetzee’s Disgrace (1999), and Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things (1997) using Michel Foucault’s understanding of heterotopias alongside Homi Bhabha’s term unhomeliness. What emerges is an understanding of how the ‘post’ in postcolonial literature belies the way power continues to function in these societies. These readings reveal how histories of oppression persist even after the end of colonialism. The structures that emerge to take their place continue to buttress imperial standards that often result in the containment and enclosure of threatening forces. For this essay, those threats are women who attempt to imagine an alternative way of being in the world – through literary escapes, communal living, and forbidden love affairs. Such moments suggest that the heterotopic possibilities presented by these characters are foreclosed through patriarchal, racist, classist, and sexist forces at work in the texts. By reading these scenarios across a range of Anglophone novels, this essay uncovers patterns of oppression that, while varying across time and space, show the ways in which power, no matter who holds it, continues to push those most oppressed further from the centres of power.

Gothic Realism, or Reading is Believing in Dracula

This essay explores the ways Bram Stoker brings eighteenth-century affective gothic reading practices to bear on Victorian fiction’s investments in realism. By investigating modes of affective reading in Dracula, the essay develops a definition of ‘gothic realism’ to describe an affective experience of the real that gothic fiction offers in place of verisimilitude and representations of everyday life. Beginning by tracing the explicit and implicit histories of this term through both literary criticism and the gothic tradition, the essay turns to Dracula to discover an alternative definition of ‘gothic realism’ that bridges a longstanding divide between the colonial fractures intrinsic to nineteenth-century Irish literature and the claims to coherent representational reality usually aligned with the Victorian novel. ‘Gothic realism’ becomes a term, and a reading practice, for newly understanding how the gothic entwines with realism across both British and Irish nineteenth-century fiction, not as its critical antithesis, or as its hidden secret, but as an affective mode through which we can see nineteenth-century Irish novels representing the realities of the world around them.

White is For Witching: A Postcolonial Gothic

In White is for Witching (2009), Helen Oyeyemi defamiliarizes traditional narratives, subverts the classical doctrines and inserts recent issues. Although her novels are mostly read within the scope of gothic literature, she introduces ethnic mythology and folklore that provide myriad perspectives. As well as incorporating the traditional gothic features, Oyeyemi draws from the cultural motifs of her Nigerian roots to highlight the recurring patterns of immigration, coexistence, and integration in English history. Using the vocabulary and the pattern of gothic narration, the novel constructs a postcolonial story to question the xenophobic tendencies of the English nation as a legacy of the colonial era that endures today through immigration policies. Therefore, in this article, I read the novel as a postcolonial gothic criticising the xenophobic concerns of pure white Englishness against racial others and immigrants labelled as invaders of English identity through the elements of cultural gothic.