Zusammenfassung der Ressource
Liminality
- Comes from the Latin word "limen" meaning "threshold"
- Refers to someone or something
being on the boundary of two
things - often two extremes.
- Like a transitory stage
- Manuel Aguirre argues that it is a
defining feature of gothic literature
- Liminality in Frankenstein
- The Creature
- On the boundary of life and death
- Neither a success or a failure. It
wasn't quite the end result that
Victor was hoping for but he did
succeed in creating life
- Is he good or evil?!?!?!
- Justine
- Also on the boundary
of life and death
- "The poor victim, who on the
morrow was to pass the awful
boundary between life and death..."
- Victor
- Victor is often closely linked with the sublime. This
fills the protagonist with a sense of awe and dread
- "the awful and majestic in nature" - This adheres
to the sublime and majestic in nature. Victor's
perception of the world around him seems
influenced by his own turmoil
- Edmund Burke notes in "On the Sublime
and Beautiful" (Useful critic idk)
- Is Victor good or evil? He usually
switches between two extremes
like the typical Gothic protagonist
- Thinks he's aiding the world but
he neglects his creation
- Liminality in Macbeth
- The witches
- Although the witches are inherently
supernatural, they seem to rest on the
liminal line between worldly and
otherworldly/male and female
- Banquo: "look not like th'inhabitants
o'th'earth, / And yet are on't"
- Links could be drawn with Macbeth's
liminal nature as the witches could be
considered a product of his desires
- Macbeth
- Never quite inherently good or evil
- His evil may be considered excusable
because of Lady M's influence
- He is hugely conflicted
- Lady M
- Is also very much 'inbetween'
- Borders on the super natural
- "unsex me here"
- Not as supernatural as the witches tho
- The walls of the castle (yh
they count as a character
now!)
- The outside world is one of order and justice
- inside the castle however, there is
schemes, duplicity, deception, the
supernatural, ghosts, apparitions, murder
etc
- Liminality in Doctor Faustus
- Faustus
- Is he good or evil?!?!?!? (IDEK)
- Wants to gain knowledge to help the world n stuff
- But he sells his soul in order to do so :/
- Ends up using his devilish powers to be a prick
- Mephistopheles
- Seems pretty evil but may
not be inherently evil
- He's constantly after Faustus' soul
and lives to serve Lucifer
- However, he is just a tortured soul
just tryin to make a livin init
- Mephestopheles: "O Faustus, leave these frivolous
demands/Which strike a terror to my fainting soul!"