Gothic Motifs Research Articles

It's my house, isn't it?: Memory, haunting and liminality in Stephen King's Bag of Bones

Rich in its references to history and regionalism, Stephen King's Bag of Bones (1998) provides an in-depth study of how the personal and communal intertwine within the context of small-town Maine life. King uses the device of a haunted house, here in the form of a rural log cabin, to consider how the past lingers to inform and shape the present. This article argues that the house functions specifically as a liminal space; caught between past and present, the living and the dead, it provides a transitional area in which traumatic memories of racially motivated violence are relived and continually thrust back upon the community responsible. These ideas can be linked to gothic themes of past horror and the return of the repressed. My article thus considers how the classic gothic motif of haunting permits an exploration of the nature of memory and identity in the special kind of arena that liminality provides.

Monstrous Identities: Critical Realism and Gothic Fantasy in Maurice Gee’s The Fire-Raiser

Maurice Gee’s children’s novel The Fire-Raiser sits firmly in the social realist tradition, yet also includes some decidedly gothic elements. While children’s literature has displayed an increasing gothicism in recent years, texts such as Margaret Mahy’s The Tricksters employ the gothic for the narrative and allegorical possibilities allowed by the supernatural. The Fire-Raiser in contrast has no supernatural elements. Gee’s novel shows how genre motifs can be employed by a realist text, since rather than mitigating the social critique characteristically implied by the critical realist stance, the use of gothic’s concern with the monstrous actually reinforces it. While certainly not a part of the “high” gothic tradition or a schlock-horror gothic fiction in the pulp tradition of Stephen King, The Fire-Raiser utilizes gothic motifs as a kind of window-dressing, investing social critique and didacticism with the titillating thrills of popular fantasy.

The gothic in children's literature. Haunting the borders (review)

Reviewed by: The gothic in children's literature. Haunting the borders Victoria Flanagan USA Anna Jackson, Karen Coats, AND Roderick McGillis (EDS), The gothic in children's literature. Haunting the borders. (Series: Children's literature and culture; 43) New York [et al]: Routledge 2008 VII + 254pp ISBN 9780415960366 US$ 100.00 Gothic motifs and themes have never been more popular in children's literature, as evidenced by the worldwide publishing success of series such as Harry Potter, Twilight, and Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events. This engaging and comprehensive study traces the wide-spread impact of the Gothic in children's books and, in the words of editor Roderick McGillis, asks "why a form that we might think inappropriate for young readers is so pervasive in the various forms of textuality produced for them" (p. 27). Part of this volume's appeal is its wide-ranging focus. It tackles subjects as diverse as the relationship between humor and the Gothic, the novels of Neil Gaiman, the role of the family in contemporary young adult fiction, J.K. Rowling's employment of the Gothic mode when representing female development in the Harry Potter series, and the way in which Gothic comics for young readers subvert comic book conventions and open up new and liberating spaces for child and female characters. Many of the ideas canvassed are innovative and intriguing, particularly those expressed in standout chapters by Nadia Crandall (Cyberfiction and the Gothic Novel), Rose Lovell-Smith (the Gothic representation of the beach in The Tricksters, a novel by New Zealand writer Margaret Mahy) and Roderick McGillis's excellent conclusion (which uses M.T. Anderson's vampire novel Thirsty to propose that the Gothic mode can offer positive ways in which to understand and explain human behavior). Aside from the fact that this book is both compelling and interesting, it fills a necessary gap in recent children's literature criticism. Reflecting on the popularity of the Gothic in fictions produced for children and adolescents, this volume also poses questions about changing cultural attitudes towards the innocence of children – because, unlike conventional Gothic heroines, the child protagonists of contemporary children's narratives rarely need rescuing; they are eminently capable of saving themselves. [End Page 71] Copyright © 2010 Bookbird, Inc.

Stretching "The Sensational Sixties": Genre and Sensationalism in Domestic Fiction by Victorian Women Writers

Stretching "The Sensational Sixties":Genre and Sensationalism in Domestic Fiction by Victorian Women Writers Tamara Wagner (bio) It has become a critical commonplace that midcentury sensation fiction provided a crucial conduit for the Victorian novel's development as a self-consciously middle-class form of cultural expression that renegotiated representations of the domestic. What has remained reduced, at best, to tangential references, however, is the adoption—and to an important extent, the pre-figuration—of sensational paradigms in fiction by domestic novelists. As these novelists were primarily women writers who largely defined themselves as anti-sensational by adhering to the idea of home as a desirable cultural institution, this distinction was premised not so much on style or modes of representation as on an ideological outlook that could be pointedly ambiguous. Such straightforward dichotomies of sensational versus domestic or even antifeminist counterparts obscure the two-way process of influence between changing, complementary, and competing narrative forms. In engaging critically with the literary potential of the sensational to redefine domestic ideals, midcentury experiments in domestic realism stretch the margins of the sensational sixties. This adoption and subsequent adaptation of popular paradigms were by no means unidirectional. Nor were they exclusively restricted to the sensational. On the contrary, despite attempts to police sensationalism's perceived incursion into the increasingly well-guarded confines of domestic realism, critics and novelists at the time were keenly aware of the opportunities this mutual influence generated beyond a mere justification of their own integration of popular elements into their writing. Whereas the increasingly critical, even tongue-in-cheek, invocation of sensation fiction's most prevalent motifs in the 1870s testifies to its adaptability, it is particularly revealing to look more closely at emergent sensationalism in the 1850s, a phenomenon that has only recently received critical attention. In order to illustrate how this twofold stretching of the sensation genre's demarcations compels us to broaden our understanding of its cultural centrality and its impact on the novel genre, I shall concentrate on the works of two otherwise markedly different women writers who have both repeatedly been dismissed as antifeminist and, by implication, as resistant to literary sensationalism's [End Page 211] subversive potential. While opening up any such facile alignments to critical investigation, these texts simultaneously frame sensationalism's inception and its growing presence from the early 1850s to the redeployment of what had become quickly consolidated paradigms in the mid-1870s. Published in 1853, when sensation fiction was slowly taking centre stage in the book market, Charlotte M. Yonge's The Heir of Redclyffe engenders a twofold domestication of the Gothic as it both reworks traditional Gothic motifs and creates an awareness of the fissures within domestic realism. Embedding the Byronic Sir Guy Morville's desire to belong to a domestic family within a spectrum of newly evolving sensational motifs, the novel asserts domesticity as an ideal. It sensationalizes the domestic in order to revaluate it. What soon becomes a recurrent twist in domestic fiction's exploitation of the sensation novel's "domestic Gothic" is complicated in the construction of a bohemian surrogate family as an alternative in Eliza Lynn Linton's Patricia Kemball (1875). As the heroine deserts the home begrudgingly offered by her aunt to seek refuge in the household of a poor physician and his spinster sister, the orphan's informal adoption accentuates the pressing need for a home all the more poignantly by rejecting its conventional definitions. In both novels, the desire for adult adoption underscores both the fallibilities and the appeal of the nuclear family. The novels' implicit questioning of family structures thereby does not so much contain as rechannel the subversive strategies with which nineteenth-century sensational writing has traditionally been credited. Instead, an extended metaphorical construction of adoption and expulsion operates at once to tease out and to invert the domestic Gothic's variegated narrative potential. Indeed, we must get away from understanding the sensation novel as a fixed, always easily identifiable category. Sensation fiction did not suddenly burst onto the market, nor was it isolated from competing modes of representing everyday life. Situated within this volatile, intensely self-critical, and constructive interchange, Yonge's and Linton's versions of...

« You don’t suspect me of doing anything wrong, do you ? » Peurs, soupçons et paranoïa dans The Woman in White de Wilkie Collins

When Wilkie Collins launched the « sensation novel » with the publication of The Woman in White in 1859, he reworked late eighteenth-century gothic motifs and plot-patterns, and adapted them to the mid-Victorian modern world. In The Woman in White, mysterious, secretive and dangerous characters abound, from the ghostly virgin dressed in white who wanders at night and threatens to reveal secrets, to the Italian count and the British baronet who incarcerate the heroine under her half-sister’s name in a lunatic asylum in order to inherit her fortune. However, behind the domestic plot, anxieties related to foreigners and to the fears of foreign invasion seep through. The discovery of Sir Percival Glyde’s real identity or the recovery of Laura Fairlie’s identity fade behind the mysteries revolving around Collins’s modern villain, Count Fosco and many other Italian spies who endanger the British nation. This paper examines the fears and anxieties on which Collins’s novel hinges. From mere domestic secrets to anxieties related to national security, Collins describes a modern world ruled by suspicions, and constructs his characters as paranoid patients.

The Inverse Gothic Invasion Motif in Daphne Du Maurier's Jamaica Inn: The National Body and Smuggling as Disease

Although a staple of Gothic fiction, the theme of invasion by alien forces, so prominent in Dracula, the Sherlock Holmes canon, and other masterpieces of the genre, does not at first glance lend it...

Emigration Gothic: A Scotswoman’s Contribution to the New World

Ellen Ross (1816?–1892) emigrated from Scotland to Montreal at mid-century and wrote two Gothic novels, in one of which – Violet Keith, An Autobiography (1868) – she used the Canadian setting as a fantastic Gothic locale in which to explore areas of social and sexual transgression. Drawing on earlier traditions of European Gothic, including Sir Walter Scott’s mythologized Scottish landscape, and on an emerging North American genre of convent exposes, Ross’s writing accommodates female protest, distances it from reality and allows its dissipation in conventional denouements. If female Gothic can be read as an analogue of realistic women’s problems, then perhaps this analogy can be extended to encompass emigration and immigrant life. The paper analyzes Ross’s motifs of loss, imprisonment, solitude, surveillance and deliverance and considers the possibility that Gothic motifs in her work both conceal and express features of the immigrant’s psychic battle with the transition to the New World.

Female Gothic Motifs in Mona Caird's The Wing of Azrael

importance as one of the key New Woman figures of fin-de-siecle Britain. Most of her novels, with the notable exception of The Daughters of Danaus (1894), remain unpublished and unavailable to the modern reader. The few critics who choose to include Caird's work in their analyses typically emphasize the radical feminist, anti vivisection and anti-eugenic content of her writings rather than her novels' aesthetics or artistic achievement.1 Caird's fictional oeuvre, discussed in a wide socio-historical context, is habitually linked with her non-fictional writings (such as the accomplished and influential essays collected in The Morality of Marriage /1897]) and treated either as an expression of radical first wave feminism, or as a pr?figuration of the concerns of the second wave feminist movement of the 1970s. Content, then, remains the main focus of critical interest in Caird's writings, even though her aesthetic principles and narrative techniques may occasionally be evoked in discussions of feminist poetics and literary canon. If, in the words of Ann Heilmann, "\fjin-de-sikle fiction became the site of contestation between masculinist (decadent) and feminist (ethically grounded) aesthetics of art, between (high) 'art' and the world of mass culture and commerce" {New Woman Fiction 156), Caird's novels may be perceived as an excellent illustration of the latter, feminist, aesthetics in the making. This essay seeks to

SEMINAL GOTHIC DISSEMINATION IN HARDY’S WRITINGS

I think I am one born out of due time, who has no calling here.* * *If way to the Better there be, it exacts a full look at the Worst.— Hardy, “In Tenebris II,” Poems of the Past and the PresentCRITICS HAVE TOO OFTEN dismissed the Gothic elements in Thomas Hardy’s writings as superficial trappings to be found mostly in his minor fiction.1 The aim of this article is to show that the diffusion of Gothic motifs in the whole of Hardy’s literary production is something both intentional and fruitful. The Gothic is indeed a vital part of Hardy’s artistic vision, and it adds to the aesthetic value of his works. His major novels and his poetry are as rife with Gothic lore as his early “minor” fiction.2 This propagation of Gothic elements is central to the dialectic between impregnation and dispersal contained in the etymology of the word “dissemination” (meaning both “sowing” and “scattering”).3

Possessed by the Gothic: Stephen Crane's "The Monster"

NICK LOLORDO Possessed by the Gothic: Stephen Crane's "The Monster" The time is perhaps ten years after the Civil War, the place a small town in New York State. A fire has broken out in the home of Dr. Trescott, the town's leading physician; trapped upstairs is his son. Henry Johnson, Trescott's coachman and former domestic servant, is first to the scene and unhesitatingly rushes inside in search of young Jimmie Trescott. In the course of saving the boy, Johnson's face will be horribly disfigured by an accident in the doctor's laboratory, rendering him "the monster" of the story's title. As Johnson enters the smokefilled house, Stephen Crane's narrative gaze coolly shifts: "In the hall a lick of flame had found the cord that supported 'Signing the Declaration .' The engraving slumped suddenly down at one end, and then dropped to the floor, where it burst with the sound of a bomb" (21). The historical picture is a recognizably Gothic piece of decor, evocative of a remote causality, the long arm of the past guiding events in the present. But how to understand the violent destruction of a representation which itself portrays the foundational American revolt against paternal tyranny? Is this fire a new revolution, a mysterious loosing of social energies that will disrupt the existing order? Or is it merely a parodie repetition, with its ironic echo of "bombs bursting in air," that suggests history repeating itself as farce, revolution in reverse? I argue that the event might better be read as an interpretive key to the story's governing aesthetic: the destroyed engraving, as its title indicates, is a classically realist work of art, implicated in a historical or journalistic attitude towards American history that this particular story refuses to assume. The allegorical marker is planted in the text only to remain Arizona Quarterly Volume 57, Number 2, Summer 2001 Copyright © 2001 by Arizona Board of Regents ISSN 0004- 1 6 10 34Nick LoLordo unacknowledged; Crane's mention of the Revolution must ultimately be understood as the destruction of the referent. Crane's realism, then, is a dehistoricized realism, in which the Gothic replaces history rather than interpreting it.1 This realism proves insufficiently capacious; the narrative as a whole is unable to acknowledge what it understands at the tell-tale level of style, and thus its realism, produced in part by a critique of popular or sentimental discourses, comes to seem an evasion, leaving a vacuum which Gothic figures rush to fill. Crane's fiction, and specific aspects of Crane's style which I will treat as significantly Gothic, have been considered under various generic categories: realism or, more often, its subsets naturalism or impressionism .2 In the teleology of prose fiction, these terms refer to developments which are taken to supersede the Gothic, without banishing its components .3 Hints of this teleological reading can be seen in the initial responses to "The Monster."4 Those who read it as a tale of horror were unimpressed: an anonymous reviewer in the Book Buyer found a conception "worthy of Poe" ruined by realism and "attention to irrelevant detail," while Julian Hawthorne saw the story as a failed reworking of the Frankenstein dilemma in a "realistic style" (qtd. in Weatherford 262, 259). Favorable early comments on "The Monster" simply reversed this judgment and saw its success within the terms of realism, arguing that the moral failure of the community in forcing Trescott to abandon the horribly disfigured Johnson was meant to be instructively contrasted with the doctor's acceptance of his duty toward the man who saved his son. Both positions distinguish between realistic social critique and lurid horror; they notice the story's two aspects, but fail to account for the relation between them, the peculiar network of misrecognitions and disavowals that makes "The Monster" so troubling. The Gothic motifs which disfigure Crane's narrative appear in the place which Eve Sedgwick, in her study of Gothic conventions, has designated as crucial to the genre: the descriptive surface. Observing that much criticism of the Gothic has been based on an implicitly Freudian model of depth psychology, Sedgwick argues that this governing metaphor...

Postcolonial ghosts in the Caribbean: Lloyd w brown's Duppies

A ghost is the sign that a haunting is taking place, according to sociologist, Avery Gordon (8), who defines ‘ghost’ as a ‘social figure’, one form by which something lost, or not visible, is made known. This paper looks at the signs of haunting in a postcolonial context in Lloyd W Brown's poetry collection Duppies. The poems are inspired by Brown's revisiting of Jamaica and the ‘ghosts’ (duppies, soucouyants, rolling calves and zombies) that are invoked relate to his past ‐ his childhood memories and violent ancestral history. However, they also reflect how the colonial past continues to haunt present day, post‐independence Jamaica. I examine a selection of poems which demonstrate Lloyd Brown's use of gothic motifs. These represent his personal view of the condition of postcolonial Jamaica, and “write back” to dominant colonial discourses. In so doing, I call upon Bill Ashcroft's work on the process of writing back and postcolonial transformations and the insights of Avery Gordon, David Punter, Glennis Byron and Marina Warner into the notion of haunting.

Camping the Gothic

Since its release in the late 1940s, Other Voices, Other Rooms has remained an arguably unpopular novella in the works of Truman Capote; its criticism is thus far from recent. Most critiques explore the work in its historical milieu of Southern-gothic fiction, either intentionally or unintentionally avoiding the very prominent queer themes. This article acknowledges Capote's use of gothic paradigms and the text's process of undermining gothic motifs to highlight its two adolescent queer characters. Moreover, the text's own Camp discourse is the liberating force that extinguishes the looming Southern-gothic background to expose the sexual possibilities for its young characters. Amidst the sea of late forties and fifties fiction that frequently ensconced the death of the homosexual character, this novella serves as an exception: through a humorous Camp aesthetic, the text gives birth to its inherent queer desires.

The Lady Chapel of Glastonbury Abbey

After the devastating fire of 1184, the Lady Chapel of Glastonbury Abbey was constructed on the site of the Old Church (Vetusta Ecclesia), the wattle church traditionally associated with Joseph of Arimathea. The lavish decoration of the chapel is frequently mentioned in the literature. In many cases authors emphasize the old-fashioned, Romanesque character of much of the ornament in contrast to the seemingly more progressive contemporary early Gothic mouldings of nearby Wells Cathedral. Nevertheless, it is generally recognized that the designer of Glastonbury Lady Chapel knew of the latest developments in French Gothic architecture as witnessed in his use of crocket capitals and sharply pointed arches in the vault. This juxtaposition of Romanesque and Gothic motifs has led to the categorization of the Lady Chapel as Transitional. Convenient as such a label may be as a term of reference in charting a purely typological evolution, it does little for our understanding of the use of some distinctly different elements in contemporary structures located in the same region. Is it the case that the patron and/or master mason of Glastonbury Lady Chapel are simply more conservative than at Wells Cathedral? Could Glastonbury Lady Chapel be consciously archaizing in an effort to emphasize the antiquity of the site? Should we perhaps think in terms of a traditional Benedictine monastic style at Glastonbury as opposed to an innovative style for the secular canons of Wells? Or is the rich decoration at Glastonbury Lady Chapel to be explained in a more general sense as an imitation of the art of church treasures? To address these questions the first part of this essay will examine the stylistic sources of the Lady Chapel. The meaning of the style of the Lady Chapel in the context of the beginnings of Gothic architecture in Britain will be discussed. Attention will then be turned to the sculpture of the Lady Chapel (Thurlby 1976a).

Postcolonial Gothic: Ruth Prawer Jhabvala and the Sobhraj Case

Postcolonial Gothic:Ruth Prawer Jhabvala and the Sobhraj Case Judie Newman (bio) Gothic motifs are Exceptionally Prevalent in postcolonial fiction, even from very different locations. Classic postcolonial transformations of Gothic emanate from the Caribbean (Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea), Africa (Bessie Head's A Question of Power) and India (Ruth Prawer Jhabvala's Heat and Dust). In Canada, Gothic is almost the norm, whether in Margaret Atwood's comic Lady Oracle, or Anne Hébert's Héloise (the Québecois tale of a vampire who haunts the Paris Metro), or Bharati Mukherjee's Asian-Canadian Jasmine. Not surprisingly, when the heroine of Alice Munro's Lives of Girls and Women thinks of writing about Jubilee, Ontario, she promptly chooses to begin a Gothic novel. Nearer home, ghosts wander the pages of Paul Scott's Raj Quartet, and J. G. Farrell begins his Empire Trilogy in a decaying Great House, complete with mysteriously fading heroine, demonic cats, and an ever-widening crack in the external wall. Further afield, what is Isak Dinesen doing on a coffee farm in Kenya in 1931 but writing Seven Gothic Tales? It is Dinesen's activity which first raises the question of the ideological consequences of the transfer of a European genre to a colonial environment. Gothic does not always travel well. As Eric O. Johannesson was swift to note, Dinesen creates a fictional Africa [End Page 85] which is the counterpart of the eighteenth-century European feudal world of her tales (129). Setting out into an African forest, she writes: "You ride out into the depths of an old tapestry, in places faded and in others darkened with age, but marvelously rich in green shades" (Blixen 64). One suspects the Kikuyu did not share her view of a leopard as "a tapestry animal" (Blixen 65). Dinesen exemplifies here the tendency of the West to textualize the colonial, to transform the Other into a set of codes and discourses which can be recuperated into its own system of recognition, as hegemonic discourse accomplishes its project of endlessly replicating itself. The consequences of generic transfer suggest, then, the difficulty implicit in any counter-discourse—the danger of reinserting the norms of the dominant discourse within its own apparent contestation, as (to quote Richard Terdiman), "the contesters discover that the authority they sought to undermine is reinforced by the very fact of its having been chosen, as dominant discourse, for opposition" (65). Rewritings, counter-texts, run the risk of slippage from oppositional to surreptitiously collusive positions. Postcolonial Gothic is therefore Janus-faced. At its heart lies the unresolved conflict between the imperial power and the former colony, which the mystery at the center of its plot both figures and conceals. Its discourse therefore establishes a dynamic between the unspoken and the "spoken for"-on the one hand the silenced colonial subject rendered inadmissible to discourse, on the other that discourse itself which keeps telling the story again and again on its own terms. As a European genre, Gothic cannot unbind all its historical ties to the West. Conversely, its ability to retrace the unseen and unsaid of culture renders it peculiarly well-adapted to articulating the untold stories of the colonial experience. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick has analyzed the Gothic emphasis on the "unspeakable," both in the intensificatory sense of "nameless horrors," and in the play of the narrative structure itself, with its illegible manuscripts, stories within stories, secret confessions, and general difficulty in getting the story told at all. As Sedgwick puts it, Gothic novels are "like Watergate transcripts. The story does get through, but in a muffled form, with a distorted time sense, and accompanied by a kind of despair about any direct use of language" (Sedgwick 13). In her analysis a central privation of Gothic is that of language. When the linguistic safety valve between inside and outside is closed off, all knowledge becomes solitary, furtive and explosive. As a result dire knowledge may be shared, but it cannot be acknowledged to be shared, and is therefore "shared separately," as the barrier of [End Page 86] unspeakableness separates those who know the same thing. This Gothic apartheid is almost a classic definition of Imperialism...

Post-Reformation Mixed Gothic in Huntingdonshire Church Towers and its Campanological Associations

It has been said that there was a stagnation in church building during the late sixteenth century, but this seems to be a myth, brought about because work of this period may be almost indistinguishable from earlier products and many church towers have been mistakenly attributed. A major breakthrough in campanological technology is demonstrated which led to over half the county's church towers being strengthened, improved or rebuilt. A notch found in newel stairs helps to identify those of this period, as does the revival of Decorated style features. The era is seen as one of Mixed Gothic motifs.

Jane and the Other Mrs. Rochester: Excess and Restraint in "Jane Eyre"

lane Eyre is a didactic novel which subordinates the values of passion to those of restraint. Its central and readily demonstrable moral doctrine is that individualism must be subjected to time-honored human conventions and that romantic passion cannot be allowed to usurp the prerogatives of divine law. When Jane makes her crucial decision and leaves Rochester, this message is explicit in her stated and unqualified rationale for doing so, and it is implicit in the shape of the subsequent action, which is designed to show that her decision was correct. However, clarity is not persuasiveness, and an argument that would forbid a romance as compelling as this one must be persuasive indeed. If the denouement of the story, Jane's enrichment, liberation, marriage, and maternity, demonstrates the practicality of her earlier decision, the validity of the principle that underlies this decision is never substantiated. The novel never really justifies its premises; it merely and flatly asserts that Jane is correct. Were assertion the unique rhetorical mode of Jane Eyre, modern readers would be forced to accept a rather unconvincing and limited vision. However, Charlotte Bronte's opinions on passion and restraint are not confined to dictum and transparent parable as modes of expression. The specific substance of her argument is such that it cannot be demonstrated literally, and thus she must present it figuratively. Within a Gothic context rich in symbolic potential the novel presents a rhetoric that supports its fundamental imperative, and the key figure in this rhetoric is Rochester's mad wife, Bertha. A new twist on the old Gothic motifs of dark secrets, family curses, and monstrous or unearthly apparitions, she exists within a tradition that subverts the decorum of verisimilitude, and other conventions as well.' Within this less restrictive dimension she functions to communicate, through symbol, analogy, and example, a rationale for the moral bases of the novel. As the figurative representation of something unspeakable and as a projection of Jane's own dark potentials, Bertha is used to show why Jane must act as she does and why, despite the strength of opposing arguments and sympathies, the protagonist must decide to leave her beloved when his prior marriage is revealed.2