The Dark Side of Romanticism: Exploring the Gothic Genre
· It expresses the darker side of life: a world of pain and destruction, fear, and anxiety that shadows the daylight world of love and ethereality.
· It consists of a set of analyzable displacements about what it means to be human and gendered.
· It strains at the limits of mortality/immortality, morality/immorality, reason/emotion, order/disorder, mind/body, and masculine/feminine (Dracula).
· Gothic fictions are structured as case histories of types of insanity. As readers, we are asked to adjudicate various diagnostic accounts. There is a pleasure/pain dichotomy that explains why we enjoy reading these novels (exploring the unexplainable limits of humanity).
· In general, fiction of fear arises at times of great social and economic upheaval, when reason disappears. Gothic fiction introduces a prolonged contemplation of the objects in the individual’s internal world. At the same time, there is a repeated vindication of the individual’s ability to survive despite threats.
· Landscapes of Childhood: Narcissism, incest, violence and vampirism, androgyny and sexual anarchy, the Oedipal triangulation, projective identification (I am the Other), and splitting are two dominant psychological defenses. Like other Romantic texts, the Gothic deals with interruptions in the maturation process; they are tales of recuperation or reparation; resistance to loss. (Narcissism is present also in Oscar Wilde).
· Like other Romantic texts, the Gothic deals with interruptions in maturation or reparation; resistance to loss.
· The Gothic exposes the essential instability of the domination and submission patterns in fantasy; the creation of doubled characters (like Doctor Jekyll and Mister Hyde or The Picture of Dorian Gray; EVIL VS. GOOD, BEAUTIFUL); self-other relationships are revealed when we realize that the hero never shares the stage with a heroine; if the text focuses on a heroine, then the male has to be a split figure: villain or weak “hero.”
· In their quest for identity as masculine or feminine, all the characters appear to be enthralled to fragmentation or disintegration. Could a monster be good?
Essential Elements of Gothic Literature
· We need A GOOD SETTING TO GOTHIC – Conventional trappings = heroine, hero and villain, clouds, castles, mystery, the inevitable travel sequence that transports the characters from everyday life, educating the reader with an aura of mystery about the proceedings. TERROR STORIES, GHOST STORIES, moon, death, nature
· Adult fairy-tale; immersion in “enchanted castle”: woman’s body.
· Assault on the castle gates, room = metaphorical rape.
· The heroine leaves the known (childhood) to venture into the unknown (adulthood); pauses in a sterile wasteland, tierra baldía (pre-sexuality), and then moves through a never-never land (courtship, magic, illusion, dream) to arrive at full sexuality (adulthood and chaste marriage). Coming-of-age novels (bildungsroman – the portrait of the artist as a young man.
Utiliza el bildungsroman para hacer el paso de la infancia a la madurez adulta: técnica. El nombre de la rosa, U. Eco: la narración, el bildungsroman, se centra en el joven o la joven se centra en la religión especialmente católica.)
· Inherent ambiguity and ambivalence lie at the core of the genre’s appeal.
The Gothic Heroine’s Journey
· The orphaned heroine (not loved) searches for surrogate parents, only to find her parents by finding herself; her most sinister enemy is her own awakening sexuality; the heroine’s task is to destroy the mythic beast within, for the wages of passion are madness, disease, and death; virtues are repression and sublimation.
· Orphans are social outsiders; they seek social approval and kinship.
· Values of silence, rectitude, balance (mind of a man and heart of woman); restrained emotions and strength of character; the century’s idealization of the Virgin Mary (ofrece sin pedir nada a cambio, passive role)/prostitute (active role, monster).
· The heroine plays the role of the etherealized maiden, brave young detective, symbolic quester of her own and others’ identities; the theme of female powerlessness; motherhood was the source of women’s greatest power.
Gender Dynamics in Gothic Literature
· Men project their own feelings onto women they then label either “bad” or “good.” They also invariably set up a rival for the women.
· Women mirror this syndrome in their invention of the “Devil/Priest” syndrome, and their rivals usually take the form of a mother-figure.
Symbolism and Themes
· Danger in the fiction is equated with an “inner space” – a secret room, etc., within the larger castle/body.
· The heroine has to earn her right to preside over the gothic castle.
· 1950s: the second Gothic revival; the heroine is now allowed to marry the demon lover. “Power” is the most prevalent word in these fictions.
· Fantasy mediates between the conscious and unconscious mind because repression will screen trauma that can only be expressed after the event and in a distorted fashion.
· Fantasy precedes identity.
Common Gothic Fantasies:
- Fantasy of desire
- Oedipal rivalries
- Incest
- Solipsism/narcissism
- Self-loathing
- Gynophobia
- Somaphobia
- Emergence of sexuality
- Eating disorders