Zusammenfassung der Ressource
Gothic Themes
- Setting
- Castle
- Pathetic
fallacy
- "It was a dreary night in November"; "Morning, dismal and wet" - VF
- "I saw, with surprise and grief, the leaves decay and fall" - VF
- Sublime
- Of the use of the sublime, Fred Botting says “the immense scale offered
a glimpse of infinity and awful power, intimations of metaphysical
force beyond rational knowledge and human comprehension."
- Isolation
- Secret passage/rooms
- Graveyards/crypts/"Bloody
chambers"
- Greenhouses
Anmerkungen:
- "Flowers grown by invisible gardeners in the Beast's hothouses" -
TCoML
- Character
- Questionable hero/antihero
- Unreliable narrator
- Judy Simmons suggests that Gothic novels “undermine
any sense of narrative stability and replace it with an
experience of incoherence and uncertainty”
- Young heroine in danger
- The Other (monsters, unknown)
- The Beast and Mr Lyon in that they are "other" from humans
- "She found his bewildering difference from herself almost intolerable;" TCoML
- Virgins
- Servant
- Femme fatale
- Society
- Religion
- "I considered Satan as the fitter emblem of my condition...
the bitter gall of envy rose within me" The Creature
- "Frankenstein is both a father and a god that has failed to love his marred creation" Harold Bloom
- "as if to tell me the eye of God--his eye--was upon me" TBC
- "The tiger-man... could take a glass of ale in his hand
like a good Christian and drink it down." TTB
- "It is Christmas Day; the werewolves' birthday" TCoW
- Supernatural
- Ghosts/spirits
- "the metal shell of the Iron Maiden emitted a ghostly
twang; my feverish imagination might have guess its
occupant was trying to clamber out" TBC
- Undead
- Devil
worship
- "Indirection and metaphor of fantasy
can be helpful when airing controversial
subject matter." - Helen Simpson
- Taboo
- Incest
- Necrophilia
- The Count "thrust[s] his virile member
into the dead girl" as his wife looks on.
TSC
- Marquis De Sade: “The strong abuse, exploit
and meatify the weak… it is eat or be eaten.”
- "I embraced her, but as I imprinted the first kiss upon her lips, they
became livid with the hue of death; her features appeared to change
and I thought I held the corpse of my dead mother in my arms." - VF
- Homosexuality
- Elizabeth Goldhammer: "Victor
hides from his double as an act of
rejection of his sexual identity"
- Byron, a member of Shelley's friendship circle, was known for his numerous
relationships with men and women, so homosexuality wouldn't have been as shocking
to Shelley, given the "libertine" tendencies of her friends.
- “His limbs were in proportion, and I had selected
his features as beautiful. Beautiful!" - VF
- Murder/suicide
- Pedophilia
- Horror/terror
- "a fearful sense of inheritance in
time with a claustrophobic sense
of enclosure in space" Chris
Baldick
- Uncanny