#gothic essay

[no-where-new-hero]

I am actually going to talk about what I call images, or symbols. It seems to me that in our present great drive—fiction-wise—toward the spare, clean, direct kind of story, we are somehow leaving behind the most useful tools of the writer, the small devices that separate fiction from reporting, the work of the imagination from the everyday account. Of these the far most important, and the most neglected, is the use of symbols; I am using the word loosely, because it has altogether different meanings elsewhere, and yet I hardly know what other word to use ... There must be at least one basic image, or set of images, for each character in a story, a fundamental symbol the writer keeps always in mind; as these images grow the character grows, and the accumulation of material and information about the image slowly makes up the character in the story. Various things belong to a character—a manner of speaking, a manner of moving, a particular emphasis, a group of small physical things—and each of these must take on, like a perfume, the essence of the character they belong to. Just as a tune or a scent can evoke for most of us an entire scene, so the basic image of the character must evoke that entire character and his place in the story. As a result of this, of course, the characters themselves grow apart in the writer’s mind, become entirely separate people, and by the end of a book or a story the writer can no more mistake one for another than he can mistake a can of beans for a pearl necklace.

--Shirley Jackson, "Garlic in Fiction"

[asphalt-eater]

i like to think goth is a gender in of itself

[anglerflsh]

architecture

[sirghostheart]

Thinking about the post that says "Congratulations! You've fallen for that character's facade" but it's about how Ginger Fitzgerald and Jennifer Check's relationship to monsterhood is misinterpreted as a #FemaleRage and #GoodForHer girlboss power fantasy instead of tragedies about about kids way over their heads surviving a traumatic assault that robbed them of their humanity and now lash out in a desperately grip for some resemblence of power.

[elektramouthed]

It is possible, on the one hand, to interpret this looping as stasis, which, as trauma studies indicate, reveals the subject’s inability to organize a narrative around her subjectivity. In other words, as a result of trauma, the subject is now locked in an originary moment she can neither relinquish nor remember, and is thereby doomed to keep repeating this moment. Until and unless she is unstuck, not only will her subjectivity remain undeveloped, but it will also be incoherent because the corresponding narrative that necessarily gives it definition has been jeopardized.

Andrew Hock Soon Ng, from Women and Domestic Space in Contemporary Gothic Narratives: The House as Subject

[twochildreninamoteldemo]

Supernatural (2005-2010) / “'A whole new level of freak:' Supernatural, Poe, and the legacy of the incestuous Gothic" by [redacted]

for @wincestwednesdays

[awaythe-clock]

The Green knight is like. Its about honour. Its about regret. Its about fear. Its about courage. Its about shame. Its about the cyclical nature of the world. Its about mirrors and parallels. Its about your mom and you. Its about death and decay. Its about choices. Its about magic. Its about trying to avoid the unavoidable. Its about aging. Its about changes you aren’t ready for but have to go through anyways. Its about chances you wanted but were too scared to take. Its about gently kissing and caressing dev patels face. Its about expectations. Its about disappointing people. Its about how you look back at all the things you couldve done differently and forward to the things that may come. Its about the unyielding but loving power of nature and life. Its about being a person.

[inkedwingss]

writing an article on the concept of gothic and the overlap with contemporary aesthetics such as dark academia etc, so listening to some nordic music seems appropriate

and that is why i have no friends bc this is what i do for fun on a saturday night xx

[djuvlipen]

If we put aside the racism, the book Hunchback of Notre Dame (by Hugo) is such a good account of how a teenage girl gets taken advantage of by different adult men who use their experience, their older age, their fame and their power, to use her for sex (Phoebus) or to prey on her and force her to sleep with them, only to kill her when she refuses (Frollo), how married men will see their wives as trophies and objects and will sleep with girls they don't care about (Phoebus again), how that teenage girl grows up in a society that grooms her to think older, powerful men are to be desired, and how Romani teenage girls are eroticized and seen as exotic (which... Hugo himself is guilty of that...).

Disney mostly corrected the racism that was in the book but they completely removed any criticism of heterosexual love that was in it. They could have taken it and gone further and made it feminist, but no, they completely removed it. Now, Esmeralda is an (adult? i sure hope she isn't supposed to be a teenager) hottie who is probably the most sexualized Disney character to have ever existed (like... she does a pole dance then flashes her genitals at Frollo's face) and her relationship with Phoebus is portrayed as pure and healthy (despite their unequal places in society). Hunchback of Notre Dame misses so many marks and could have been so much better than what we've got. I have no idea why Disney decided to adapt that story for their movies and I have no idea why they decided to turn it the way they did

[itsacruelsummerwithyou2]

college is fun because i just wrote half a final on nbc hannibal and a full paragraph was about how stabbing is romantic, actually

[magiefish]

Something I've kind of noticed about a lot of the academic scholarship I've read about Frankenstein / Dracula / Jekyll & Hyde is that everyone just seems to completely dismiss/ignore the characters as actual characters most of the time unless they're the Main Guys. Like, they'll go really in depth about Victor or the Creature's motivations and backstory and spend ages talking about Jekyll's relationship to Hyde and stuff, but the second it comes to characters like Enfield and Elizabeth or Lanyon and Clerval or frankly the Entire Rest of the Cast of Dracula, they just immediately seem uninterested. They'll just sort of vaguely gesture in their direction and go 'Oh yeah X and X thing happens to this character and here's a one sentence summary of their personality which doesn't really matter because this entire cast is interchangeable, anyway, onto the next theme' and half the time their One Sentence is just textually incorrect (looking at the New Woman/Traditional Woman descriptions of Lucy and Mina). And the reason I find this so baffling is because with other analysis I've read (e.g. Great Gatsby stuff) people seem to actually slow down and consider the characterisation and motivations of the cast as a whole with like. Nuance. Like they sit down and treat the characters as multifaceted and complex and having actual relationships with one another, and then you get to these books specifically and no one seems to care? Like they'll go really in depth with various interpretations and historical context for the Big Guys, and then never apply the same sort of examination to anyone else, and if they do, very rarely and probably only for one other character e.g. (Utterson or Mina).

If I had to posit an explanation, I would say its a combination of the archetypal nature of the title characters and the admittedly patchy writing of these books (which arguably lends to their archetypal status). I think academics kind of assume that the primary draw of these books are The Big Guys and the expansive themes and ideas they cover and that everyone else is just a pawn there to enable the narrative around the Big Guys, and the propensity for film adaptations to scrap or rewrite characters probably compounded this impression. And while I think this is at least partly true, the thing is, these characters were not always archetypal Big Guys. They originated in stories alongside *these* other characters *specifically* and it is worth asking what it is about the rest of the cast that makes the story interesting as well. Because, let's be real, if there was approximately no interest in the fucking *narrators* of Dracula, the best friends of Henry Jekyll, or the victims of the Creature, the original readers would have been completely bored out of their minds for most of these novels and public interest in them would not have been as great as it was. All of these novels were stories before they were myths, and academics should not be letting pop culture eclipse them unless they're specifically talking about the relationship between the two.

Overall, I just feel like academics are not only shooting themselves in the foot, but also doing a disservice to these stories by not bothering to investigate the other characters because frankly. It's lazy. It's lazy to dismiss an entire cast and basically skim read any sections involving them just because it's easy to focus on The One Guy. If you people really cared about themes, you'd understand that characters are inextricable from them. Like shit dude I see more care given to characters in essays about Greek tragedies, you guys are waaaay fucking behind

[raayllum]

thinking about TDP as a piece with gothic leanings. may return to this later

[chaibunbao]

Here is Season One Episode Two - Phantoms of Your Former Self!

I discuss Louis First Night as a Vampire

Louis and Leatats attachment to humanity (Lestats father in the book and how it relates to his love for music in the show . Louis sister in the show and his family in the book)

Louis first Kill - Tractor Man and The Overseer

And the conceptual twist of Louis race interacting with Mr. Carlo and how this change in the show could possibly play homage to the slaves in the book.

Check it out if you’d like! I know it’s long! If you have any criticism or advice on anything please do not hesitate to tell me! I love hearing your thoughts! (:

I also included some throw backs to the 94’ film!

Thank you in advance to anyone who watches/listens to it!

A millions billion times thank you from the bottom of my heart!

Till Next Time! <3

[agalychnisspranneusroseus]

What if I say possesion storylines are secretly about domination and colonialism and the way in which the whims of the capital dictates every single aspect of social relations, and SA, which in turn is also about colonialism

[burningvelvet]

one of my favorite theories about wuthering heights — which is admittedly controversial, probably disliked by many, and can never be definitively proven — is that heathcliff may have been mr. earnshaw's bastard child.

if mr. earnshaw didn't feel some paternal responsibility for him, then it really does make me question why he would take in a random poc kid from the city he often stayed in on business trips (which was notably liverpool, a city famously known at the time for the slave trade as well as for prostitution!), and then favor that child over his previously beloved son, especially when his wife is racist & the story is set in rural 18th century england, & liverpool was probably full of homeless orphan kids he had seen before, but i don't believe he ever mentions wanting to take in any other child, and i don't believe mr. earnshaw is described as being a particularly generous man on the whole either (although he does seem initially fond of his children when he tells them he's going to bring them back gifts).

and we never learn anything about heathcliff's background or if "heathcliff" is supposed to be his surname or his first name — so it would make sense if maybe mr. earnshaw simply wanted to conceal that he wanted to name him "heathcliff earnshaw" but his wife &/or societal conventions would never allow it.

consider: 1 heathcliff & hindley's brotherly rivalry, 2 the linton/earnshaw families are supposed to parallel each other so edgar/isabella and heathcliff/cathy would be paralleled even more if the latter two were genetically related considering both married the other two, 3 this theory fits with the traditional gothic incest theme in literature, 4 heathcliff sees himself in hareton earnshaw and even has a whole monologue about this, 5 heathcliff/cathy being half-siblings sort of adds to their whole soul connection thing.

Edit: in my struck-through text, I had forgotten here that in chapter 3 we learn Heathcliff is named by the family after Earnshaw's dead son (whose idea was it exactly? I assume Earnshaw's): "This was Heathcliff's first introduction to the family. On coming back a few days afterwards (for I did not consider my banishment perpetual), I found they had christened him 'Heathcliff': it was the name of a son who died in child-hood, and it has served him ever since, both for Christian and surname. Miss Cathy and he were now very thick; but Hindley hated him: and to say the truth I did the same; and we plagued and went on with him shamefully: for I wasn't reasonable enough to feel my injustice, and the mistress never put in a word on his behalf when she saw him wronged."