Gothic Figure Research Articles

Witchcraft and the Uncanny Origins of Cinema

Around the turn of the twentieth century, the rise of cinema as an art form and as a medium of communication offered new ways of transmitting old myths. The gothic figure of the witch offered a frisson of transgression that was ultimately contained on the big screen, especially in works considered to be unthreatening because of their playful nature. The power of transformation ascribed to witches was mirrored in the power of film itself, as demonstrated by cinema's origin story, the ‘lucky’ accident that took place as Méliès filmed on the Place de l’Opéra, in which men appeared to become women and a trolley turned into a hearse. This essay examines the gendered (and often transgendered) struggle for dominance in films depicting witches and magical transformation in the context of the Freudian uncanny in a number of early films, including several silent-era precursors to MGM's Wizard of Oz (Fleming 1939).

Hebrew Gothic: History and the Poetics of Persecution

Hebrew Gothic: History and the Poetics of Persecution

Coming-of-Age of Teenage Female Arab Gothic Fiction: A Feminist Semiotic Study

This feminist semiotic study explores the folkloric imaginary of the jinn in the context of children’s and young adults’ Arab Gothic literature. Across the Middle East, the jinn is a common trope in literature, folklore and oral storytelling who, in diegetic terms, can manifest as the Gothic figure of an aging female, deranged older woman or succubus (known as sa’lawwa in Arabic). In this study, a novel feminist semiotic framework is developed to explore the extent to which the Gothic female succubus either haunts or liberates Arab girls’ coming-of-age fictions. This issue is addressed via a feminist semiotic reading of the narratives of Middle Eastern woman author @Ranoy7, exploring the appeal of her scary stories presented on YouTube. Findings reveal tacit fears, ambivalences and tensions embodied within the Arab Gothic sign of the aging female succubus or jinn. Overall, the research develops feminist insights into the semiotic motif of the female jinn and its role in constituting Arab females as misogynistic gendered sign objects in the context of the social media story explored.

“Completion of a Circle”: Female Process of Self-Realization and Individuation in Margaret Atwood’s The Robber Bride and “I Dream of Zenia with the Bright Red Teeth”

In The Robber Bride and its sequel, “I Dream of Zenia with the Bright Red Teeth,” Margaret Atwood underscores the complex feminine identity through the femme fatale, who is depicted using mythic Gothic figures, such as the vampire. Atwood contradicts socially-sanctioned roles for women. She shapes newer and more complete social and personal female identities, questioning how inadequately the patriarchal system represents their multiplicity. The author describes how the protagonists challenge the patriarchal definition of the feminine Self on their Jungian journey towards individuation, for which the fatal woman, as the Shadow Self, acts as a catalyst.

Der gotische Muttergottes‑Altar von Guttstadt (1426)

This article offers a stylistic analysis of the Marian altar from the church of the Redeemer and All Saints in Dobre Miasto in the voivodship of Warmia and Masuria. The altar was set up in 1426 as an altar for morning mass. It remains incomplete to this day: several Gothic figures were replaced by later pieces of sculpture, and the altar was provenance is also questionable of the centrally located sculpture of Mary and Child.
 The literature up to now has pointed out stylistic analogies with the altar in Pörschken (Nowo‑Moskowskoje), at present in the collection of the Castle Museum in Malbork, and with the altar from Sokolica (Falkenau), which is at present in the collection Museum of the Archdiocese of Warmia in Olsztyn. Stylistic analysis makes it possible to establish that the closest analogy to the Dobre Miasto altar is the altar from Pörschken, while the somewhat later retable from Sokolica has many features in common with the altar from Rauma (Finland), which was a Prussian export.
 It is, however, an open question as to the location of the Prussian provincial woodcarving workshop that probably produced the altars in Dobre Miasto and Pörschken, drawing on the at that time rather old‑fashioned tradition of figures of the Madonna on lions. The literaturę suggests Malbork or Gdańsk, but because of stylistic similarities to the Elbląg Apostolic College and the links of the Elbląg Rector Mikołaj Wulsack with Dobre Miasto, Elbląg, too, must be considered.

Women in gothic fiction: Depiction of female figures in horror stories

Emerged as a reaction to the strict laws, firm regulations and scientific reasoning of the Enlightment Era, Gothic literature is accepted as the darker strain, developed during the Romantic Period in the 18th century. The authors of Gothic literature tended to create terror and suspense with the uncanny, supernatural, spiritual, and irrational elements to replace order and accepted beliefs of the Age of Reason. Gothic fiction possesses certain traits: setting as the abandoned castles, cemeteries, towers, isolated churches; mysterious and gloomy atmosphere; the use of supernatural powers such as witches, vampires, ghosts or spirits; magic, mystery and curse. Although as a genre, gothic has been associated with men, women gain crucial roles in horror stories in literature of the western and Turkish cultures. There are various epithets attributed to female characters in gothic fiction: damsels in distress, victims, domestic governesses, evils, predators or prisoners; however, in this study, victims and femme fatales in horror narration are comparatively analyzed. Within this scope, examples from western and Turkish literatures were chosen for the analysis to specify the similarities among gothic female literary characters. Based on the analysis, it could be concluded that while the victims are forced to struggle with the evil forces to resist patriarchy, femme fatale gothic figures create them to challenge patriarchy.

Beautiful Piet\xe0s in South Tyrol (Northern Italy): local or imported works of art?

The study, dedicated to Beautiful Pietàs conserved in South Tyrol (Northern Italy), aims to establish, for the first time, a connection between Austroalpine raw materials and the high-fired gypsum mortars constituting the Gothic figure groups in question. The origin and chronology of this stylistically and qualitatively differing ensemble have been subject of art historical debate for nearly a century. The discourse is dominated by three main hypotheses: itinerary of an Austrian artist versus itinerary of the work of art created in an artist’s workshop in Austria versus itinerary of the stylistic vocabulary via graphical or three-dimensional models. The comparison of the δ34S values and the 87Sr/86Sr ratios of the gypsum mortars and Austroalpine sulphate deposits (in a compilation of own reference samples and literature data) points to the exploitation of sediments in the Salzkammergut and possibly also in the evaporite district of the Eastern Calcareous Alps, thus evidencing the import of the sculptures and not the activities of local South Tyrolean or itinerant artists. Two geochronological units are distinguishable: The Pietà in the Church St. Martin in Göflan can be assigned to Upper Permian raw material, whereas the metrologically consistent sculptures in the Church of Our Lady of the Benedictine Abbey Marienberg and in the Chapel St. Ann in Mölten correlate with deposits of the Early Triassic (or the Lower-Middle Triassic transition). The medieval gypsum mortars also differ in their mineralogical characteristics, i.e. in their geologically related minor components, as in the first case, characterised by a significant proportion of primary anhydrite, natural carbonate impurities mainly consist of calcite (partly converted to lime-lump-like aggregates), whereas in the second group dolomite (or rather its hydration products after pyrometamorphic decomposition) predominates, accompanied by celestine, quartz and potassium feldspar. The Pietà in the Cathedral Maria Himmelfahrt in Bozen turned out to be made of Breitenbrunn calcareous sandstone (Leitha Mountains, Burgenland, Austria), which is why the sample is not considered in the geochemical analysis.Graphical

Gothic Overtones: The Female Monster in Margaret Atwood’s “Lusus Naturae”

In “Lusus Naturae,” Margaret Atwood shows her predilection for the machinations of Gothic fiction. She resorts to gothic conventions to express female experience and explore the psychological but also the physical victimisation of the woman in a patriarchal system. Atwood employs the female monster metaphor to depict the passage from adolescence to womanhood through a girl who undergoes a metamorphosis into a “vampire” as a result of a disease, porphyria. The vampire as a liminal gothic figure, disrupts the boundaries between reality and fantasy/supernatural, human and inhuman/animal, life and death, good and evil, femme fatale and virgin maiden. By means of the metaphor of the vampire woman, Atwood unveils and contests the construction of a patriarchal gender ideology, which has appalling familial and social implications.

The ambiguities of ancestry: antiquity, ruins and converging traditions of Australian Gothic Cinema

ABSTRACT ‘Gothic’ is identified as a prominent mode of Australian cinema since the 1970s. In commentary on Australian Gothic films, the aesthetic ancestry is often traced to literary conventions in colonial and pre-colonial British or European literatures. This article draws attention to the convergence of these literary and cinematic traditions and compares the prevalence of landscape as a Gothic figure in Australian films with the architectural elements of historical Gothic literature. The discussion proceeds through the British Gothic novel and its history as analogue of Gothic architecture of the time, and several recent accounts of ‘Australian Gothic’ cinema that invoke this history of the Gothic novel, and the dissonant description of ‘Australian Gothic’ in Susan Dermody and Elizabeth Jacka’s account of Australian Revival films. Two recent productions, Celeste [Hackworth 2018. Australia: Unicorn Films] and the television remake of Picnic at Hanging Rock [Rymer, Kondracki and Brotchie 2018. TV Mini-Series. Australia: Amazon Studios/FremantleMedia/Screen Australia], are compared as recent parodies of Gothic aesthetics that foreground architectural features over landscape. It is argued that while it is important to identify antecedents, the colonial connotations of ancestry are ambiguous and potentially overpower attention to the generative visions in Australian Gothic cinema.

The Evolution of The Vampire From A Gruesome Gothic Creature To A Superstar Of Popular Culture With Reference To The Vampire Diaries Tv Series

A vampire is a mythological-folkloric creature that is said to feed on the blood of the living. It is a Gothic uncanny figure. So judging by the outlook, a vampire is not a figure with whom we should fall in love with. But judging by the current trends in popular culture, it is not true so. Though vampires were once portrayed as gruesome and horrible, with the passage of time, change in trends and paradigm shift in popular culture, they have been naturalized as normal. They have even attained celebrity status. The evolution of the vampire from a gruesome Gothic figure to a superstar of popular culture goes through a process of three stages-
 
 Accepting the Vampire as Normal and Natural
 ‘Celebritizing’ the Vampire and Making a Star out of Him
 Narrative Technique or Storytelling of Vampire Texts

“A Poor, Washed Out, Pale Creature”: Passing, Dracula, and the Jazz Age Vampire

AbstractAlthough critics have repeatedly referenced the stagey or cinematic elements that characterize Passing’s (1929) narrative structure and occasionally observed its gothic aesthetics, thus far no critic has attempted to contextualize Nella Larsen’s novel within the American stage and film culture of the early twentieth century or the concurrent revitalization of America’s interest in the Gothic in film and theater. Situated primarily in New York and helmed by many of the same individuals, the Harlem and Gothic Renaissances of the interwar years cooperated to reframe racial and aesthetic discourses, as Harlem art absorbed and reimagined gothic art, culture, and slang and imbued Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) and its successors with covert racial commentary. This essay studies Nella Larsen’s Passing within this context, paying special attention to the influence of American racial discourse on Horace Liveright’s 1927 stage version of Dracula and its mutually influential relationship with black theater, art, and discourse. Melding contemporary archetypes of the Jazz Age vamp and gothic vampire to construct its liminal heroine, Clare Kendry, as a gothic figure in the vamp/vampire paradigm, Passing repurposes gothic elements to challenge racial binaries and to destabilize the racist status quo. This study suggests the significant extent to which Harlem Renaissance authors not only adapted the Gothic within their own literature but also reinvented and redefined it in the popular discourses of the twentieth century.

“You have a lovely and unusual name.” Mrs de Winter from Daphne du Maurier’s ”Rebecca” – a Gothic Heroine in Search of Identity

<p>The paper is devoted to the analysis of Mrs de Winter, one of the main characters from Daphne du Maurier’s <em>Rebecca</em>, as<em> </em>an example of a Gothic figure. The analysis traces the stages in the development of the heroine by demonstrating how she first becomes, through the process of <em>gothicisation</em>, “the Gothic damsel in distress.” Vulnerable and easily threatened, she is defined solely in relation to Mr de Winter, her aristocratic husband, whose status she is unable to match. As a result of her growth as an individual, Mrs de Winter is <em>degothicised.</em>We witness a change in her attitude toward her tormentors: she no longer feels intimidated; she starts developing in what we view as an identity-building process her public and personal sense of a mature and independent individual.</p>

East Asian Gothic: a definition

This paper offers a definition of East Asian Gothic cinema in which a shared cultural mythology, based upon cultural proximity and intra-regional homologies, provides a cinematic template of ghosts and ghouls together with a grotesque menagerie of shapeshifting animals, imagined as either deities or demons. East Asian Gothic is an umbrella term which encompasses the cinemas of PRC, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Japan and South Korea, acknowledging the difficult histories and conflicts between the nations, as well as film making practices and industries. This is in opposition to critical work which views East Asian gothic and horror films as extensions of Japanese horror, and therefore J-Horror as a meta-genre; for example David Kalat in J-Horror (2007) and Axelle Carolyn in It Lives Again! Horror Films in the New Millennium (2008), or focus almost solely on the relationship between contemporary Western and East Asian Horror cinema through an analysis of the remake. In order to demonstrate the transnational and regional flows that form East Asian gothic cinema, this paper focuses in on one of the oldest and most enduring gothic figures found in literature and mythology across East Asia, the nine-tailed fox: known as the huli jin in China, gumiho in Korea and kitsune in Japan. While much has been written about the vengeful ghost, little attention has been paid to that of the fox-spirit even though ‘she’ is ubiquitous in East Asian popular culture. On screen, the fox-spirit (also known as the fox fairy) is either represented as a variation of the femme fatale or the sacrificial woman—or indeed both in some cases—creating a parallel between existing gender relation and the gothic imaginary. This paper explores the representation of the fox-spirit in contemporary Chinese cinema, at two ends of the spectrum in terms of budget and ambition, the big budget, CGI spectacular, Painted Skin (Hua Pi; dir. Gordon Chan, China/Hong Kong/Singapore, 2008) and the low-budget, low fi, The Extreme Fox (dir. Wellson Chin, Hong Kong, 2014) in order to map out the multiple border crossings which are constitutive of East Asian Gothic: while Painted Skin is representative of a global, or globalising trend, in East Asian Gothic Cinema, The Extreme Fox can be understood as resistant to globalisation through the emphasis on the local and the regional.

\u201cBeauty in the lap of horror\u201d: the Gothic appeal of Erich von Stroheim in Blind Husbands (1919) and Foolish Wives (1922)

This article revisits a seminal figure of film history, the director/actor/scriptwriter Erich von Stroheim, focusing on his early work, and arguing that a Gothic framework is the most appropriate context for making sense of his complex, subversive persona; equally, the essay shows how two films dealing with urban, sophisticated characters, set in modern locations such as Monte Carlo, are in fact drenched in Gothic sensibility and aesthetics. As the director and star of Blind Husbands (1919) and Foolish Wives (1922), the Austrian-born Erich von Stroheim has so far been analysed as a catalyst for post-WWI stereotypes of unwelcome foreignness in the USA. Irrupting in a context fraught with anxieties about “evil Huns”, immigration, and ambivalent notions of Europeanness, Stroheim’s films caused both outrage and admiration. While film scholars have read Stroheim’s perceived transgression through his symbolic role of Germanic alien, they have paid scant attention to the films themselves. This omission has effectively ignored other powerful evocations emerging from Stroheim’s work, and the way its suggestions of contemporary identities are subsumed into a much wider, richer narrative: a Gothic narrative. Equally, scholars have correctly mobilized, yet not fully addressed, the essential contradiction at the basis of Stroheim’s roles: their inexplicable quality of repulsion-attraction, or in other words, Gothic abjection. This article acknowledges the films’ linkability to post-WWI xenophobia, yet argues that their subversive aspects lie in a Gothic system of signification, allowing for yet vastly exceeding cultural and national references of the period; the Gothic also provides a framework where the unresolved tensions of Stroheim’s work can meaningfully coexist. Blind Husbands and Foolish Wives centre on a staple Gothic figure, the aberrant male seducer, a “satanic” protagonist who is both molester and object of erotic desire, irresistible yet repulsive. Visually and narratively reliant on Gothic tropes, from “sublimely horrible” mise-en-scene to intimations of rape and sadism, the films daringly validate not the merely objectionable, but the abject, embodied in Erich von Stroheim’s perverse masculinity.

\u201cAn authentic ghost story\u201d: manipulating the gothic in Uncle Tom\u2019s Cabin

Perhaps the most memorable—and almost certainly the most harrowing—portions of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin occur during Tom’s time at the Legree plantation: a narrative plunge into the horrors of slavery in the Deep South, and a stylistic plunge into the realm of the Gothic. This study seeks to engage this section of Uncle Tom’s Cabin within the context of the Gothic genre, and, in so doing, reveal Stowe’s Gothic turn to be not, as some scholars have suggested, merely superficial appropriation, but rather a sophisticated manipulation of genre that culminates in a Christianization of the Gothic. By exploring Stowe’s use of Gothic figures and devices—the setting of the crumbling Louisiana plantation, the threefold Gothic female represented by Cassy, and the “haunting” of Legree—in the light of both European and American Gothic fiction, this study demonstrates how the trappings of the Gothic genre can be used to refresh and further Stowe’s progressive Christian narrative, one which ultimately refutes the Gothic by seeding it in a universe where peace, freedom, and Christian redemption are possible. This article is published as part of a collection on Gothic and horror.

The Figure of the Gothic Body in the Fiction of Caitlín R. Kiernan

This essay explores how Caitlin R. Kiernan deploys the figure of the gothic body to express the oppression of submerged individuals and groups. Kiernan's gothic figure is a body that varies from socially accepted constructs or expectations of bodily appearance, form, sexuality or gender and is usually experienced as physically unusual or grotesque, often through unwanted display or spectacle. This essay reads a selected sample of Kiernan's fiction through several theoretical lenses, including Julia Kristeva's work on abjection and melancholia, Judith Butler's theory of subjection, Garland-Thomson's disability theory, and Elaine Scarry's work on the body in pain. These lenses reveal how Kiernan's fiction pushes upon readers the reality of physical and psychological trauma to our biological self with all of its fragility, disease, and hurt. That trauma results from the tyranny of socially constructed and enforced norms and standards that differentially affect marginalized individuals and communities.

Labyrinths of Conjecture: The Gothic Elsewhere in Jane Austen's Emma

In recent criticism, Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey has been reconsidered as a comic rather than mock-Gothic novel, shifting its mockery onto a variety of other targets: domineering men, unwary readers, the violence underpinning English domesticity. I argue that Austen continues her engagement with the Gothic, beyond Northanger Abbey, using Emma as an exemplary case. Emma not only includes explicit mentions of Gothic novels such as Ann Radcliffe's The Romance of the Forest, but implicitly reformulates the relationships between Female Gothic figures: finding a frail, victimised heroine in Jane Fairfax and a seductive femme fatale in Emma herself.

The “Gothic Complex” in Shelley Revisited

About forty years ago, when I was a new Ph.D., Percy Bysshe Shelley (as opposed to Mary Shelley) and Gothic were not considered important subjects of study, at least not together, and Gothic as one of P.B. Shelley's styles was relegated to his two highly imitative early novels of 1810-11, Zastrozzi and St. Irvyne, along with some early poetry. For last few decades this dissociation has been only gradually [right arrow]corrected by sporadic studies (such as those by Finch, Rajan, and Whatley) that have seen Gothic motifs in several Shelley masterworks long after his early novels. But not until recently has pervasiveness of Gothic in Shelley been fulsomely and continuously examined to point of generating ongoing debate about what that migration reveals. In 2015, a volume in Romantic Circles Praxis series published several new essays on Shelley and Gothic (see Brookshire), and range of debate is not stopping there. It is thus only fitting for me to offer another possible answer to a surprisingly current question: what does it mean in Shelley's thinking and for Gothic that it migrates across his work as widely and as persistently as it does? In one of those Romantic Circles essays, I offered beginnings of such an answer by proposing what I called the Gothic in Shelley (Hogle 2015), but even I did not realize then just how far it goes in a great deal of his work. I would therefore like to use this opportunity, in honor of Robert Fangbaum's pioneering work on Romanticism, to modify my past short-sightedness and, I hope, deepen my sense of that complex to offer some better explanations of why schemes from Gothic--descended, yes, from Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto (1764)--are really essential to Shelley for iconoclastic questioning and reworking of Western assumptions that he aims to incite in his readers. First, let me note briefly that I do not think what I call Gothic complex explains every use of Gothic figures in every one of Shelley's works; hence great insights in what is revealed in recent scholarship on this subject by other authors (especially Rajan). But I do believe that this coalescence, which I see as a series of steps often taken by Shelley, and speakers or characters of his, in writings from Zastrozzi onwards, is a method he uses amazingly often to jolt his audience out of stultified modes of thought towards transformations that begin to offer a different vision of world, yet without discounting lingering human attachment to older ways of thinking. The steps in this Gothic complex are usually five, as I see them, and readers can witness an instance of all five at work in this passage from Shelley's flagrantly Gothic Zastrozzi: Scarcely knowing where he was, or what to believe, for a few moments Verezzi stood bewildered, and unable to arrange confusion of ideas which floated in his brain, and assailed his terror-struck imagination. He knew not what to believe--what phantom it could be that, in shape of Zastrozzi, blasted his straining eye-balls --Could it really be Zastrozzi? Could his most rancorous, his bitterest enemy, be thus beloved, thus confided in, by perfidious Matilda? For several moments he stood doubting what he should resolve upon. At one while he determined to reproach Matilda with treachery and baseness, and overwhelm her in mid-career of wickedness; but at last concluding it to be more politic to dissemble and subdue his emotions, he went into breakfast-parlour which he had left, and seated himself as if nothing had happened, at a drawing which he had left incomplete. Besides, perhaps Matilda might not be guilty--perhaps she was deceived; and though some scheme of villainy and destruction to himself was preparing, she might be dupe, and not coadjutor, of Zastrozzi. The idea that she was innocent soothed him; for he was anxious to make up, in his own mind, for injustice which he had been guilty of towards her: and though he could not conquer disgusting ideas, unaccountable detestations, which often, in spite of himself, filled his soul towards her, he was willing to overcome what he considered but as an illusion of imagination, and to pay that just tribute of esteem to her virtues which they demanded. …

Paul Laurence Dunbar’s The Sport of the Gods and the Modern Discourse of Black Criminality

This article reads Paul Laurence Dunbar’s bleak migration novel, The Sport of the Gods (1902), for its close engagement with racial criminalization. While critical discussion of this text has frequently centered on whether Dunbar capitulated to or subtly satirized dominant antiblack stereotypes, I propose reading Sport of the Gods as a prescient diagnosis of what I call the “modern discourse of black criminality.” This emergent discourse was structured around two poles: first, a sociological narrative of racial degeneration, and second, the Gothic figure of the monstrous, roving “brute beast.” Dunbar assesses the combined stigmatizing force of these two aspects of black criminality discourse in his novel. Rather than repudiating slanders leveled against the race, Dunbar maps out the network of beliefs that engendered these stereotyped images in the first place. Through its depiction of the Hamilton family’s entrapment within this ideological web, Sport of the Gods stages the impossibility of escaping from racialized criminal stigma by recourse to notions of legitimacy and innocence.

Vampires on the Mississippi: The miscegenation scene in Show Boat

Abstract The classic American musical Show Boat, by Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein II, holds at its heart an intriguingly gothic scene. When Steve drinks Julie’s blood in the climactic ‘miscegenation scene’, his actions recall that of a vampire – a gothic suggestion that is reinforced in the libretti for the original 1927 production, and can also be found in other moments in the musical. Viewed within the contextual framework of the culturally embedded connotations of the vampire, the socio-historic context of the work itself, and the significant role of the American musical in the formation of national identity, this gothic figure can be seen to encapsulate the profound concerns embedded in the musical, and mediate the era’s cultural climate. Such a context may also suggest a particular resonance for the musical’s Jewish creators. In addition to this, Show Boat’s vampiric suggestion reveals a troubling reflection on cultural appropriation.