Gothic Conventions
- Created by: meg_white
- Created on: 10-08-20 10:18
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- Gothic Conventions
- Strange places
- Usual for characters in Gothic fiction to find themselves in a strange place
- These places are often threatening and violent, sometimes sexually enticing
- Usual for characters in Gothic fiction to find themselves in a strange place
- Clashing time periods
- Sometimes take place during moments of transition
- Sometimes bring together radically different times
- Strong opposition (but also mysterious affinity) between the very modern and the ancient
- Everything that the characters and readers think that they've safely left behind comes back with a vengeance
- 'The Uncanny'
- Essay by Sigmund Freud in 1919
- 'that class of the frightening which leads back to what is known of old and long familiar'
- Essay by Sigmund Freud in 1919
- A past that should be over and done with suddenly erupts within the present and deranges it
- Power and constraint
- Gothic world is fascinated by differences in power
- Scenes of extreme threat and isolation - either physical or psychological - are always happening or about to happen
- The 'Damsel In Distress' character is popular
- These women are often pitted against powerful men
- Sexual difference can be at the heart of the Gothic
- Plots are driven by exploration of questions of sexual desire, pleasure, power and pain
- Terror vs. horror
- Terror
- Could be morally uplifting
- Doesn't show horrific things explicitly but suggests them
- 'Expands the soul' of the readers of her works and helps them to be more alert to the possibility of things beyond their everyday life
- Concerned with the psychological experience of being full of fear and dread and thus of recognising human limits
- Horror
- 'Freezes and nearly annihilates' the senses of its readers as it shows atrocious things too explicitly
- Morally dangerous and produces the wrong kind of excitement in the reader
- Focuses on the horrific object or event itself, with essentially damaging or limiting consequences for the reader's state of mind
- Terror
- A world of doubt
- Particularly doubt about the supernatural and the spiritual
- Seeks to create in our minds the possibility that there may be things beyond human power, reason and knowledge
- Possibility is always accompanied by uncertainty
- Exaggerated interest in the supernatural and the constant possibility that even very astonishing things will turn out to be explicable
- Seeks to create in our minds the possibility that there may be things beyond human power, reason and knowledge
- Uncertainty that accompanies gothic is very characteristic of a world in which orthodox religious belief is waning
- Doubt is often accompanied by the most powerful effects or emotions that the writer can invoke
- Particularly doubt about the supernatural and the spiritual
- Strange places
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