"The villain of the piece has to be fairly upper class"
The Gothic was "appealing to
everyone who enjoyed a vicarious
thrill" not just to women
"Ambiguities of reality are everywhere"
Dracula is "almost
automatically cinematic"
"Wolves are deep in the psychology of Europe"
Gothic texts are "written by outsiders"
Dracula is the "personification
of the undead"
Nick Groom
"The Gothic blurs the boundaries of the victim and perpetrator"
"Art is a way to keep the dead among
us"
"Dorian becomes a vampire himself, feeding on sin"
The central question within the Gothic is "who, or what, am I?"
"There is a blurring between
one's self and the other"
"The past is inescapable, and indissolubly linked to the present"
Dracula is "a novel that questions what it is to be human"
Female vampire "embodies a fear of
non-heterosexual reproduction and the rejection
of men"
The vampire "combines
fears and fantasies of
consumption"
Stoker "inverts the Eucharist"
Fred Botting
Gothic novels "adopt a cautionary
stategy, warning of dangers of social and
moral transgression in their darkest and
most threatening form"
"Gothic signifies a writing of excess"
"Gothic landscapes are desolate, alienating and full of menace"
"The Castle gradually gave way to the old house: as both
building and family line, it became the site where fear
and anxieties returned in the present"
"In Gothic productions imagination and emotional effects
exceed reason"
"Passion, excitement and sensation transgress social
proprieties and moral laws"
"Exciting rather than informing, it chilled their blood,
delighted their superstitious fancies"
"Gothic fictions seemed to promote vice and violence, giving free reign to selfish
ambitions and sexual desires"
Clive Bloom
'The Gothic speaks to the dark side of domestic fiction'
Robert Kidd
David Rogers
"Narratives constructed upon a clash between
polar forces such as those of Good and Evil are
as old as narrative itself"
Stoker is "pitting Dracula against a group of
un-ambiguously 'manly' men whose
qualities, actions and outlook seem to
contrast him in virtually every way"
The men "in being accepted for what they are not, they
become ironically aligned with their enemy"
Elaine Showalter
Fin de Siecle: "all the laws that governed sexual
identity and behaviour seemed to be breaking
down"
Gail Cunningham
The New Woman as: "a nervous
type, often anorexic, a
neurasthenic woman, prone to
hysteria"
The New Woman as: "a highly sexual
creature, whose permissiveness
undermined social stability"
John Bowen
"The genre of Gothic is a particularly strange and
perverse family of texts"
The strange place a protagonist finds themselves: "It is often
threatening or violent, sometimes sexually enticing, often a
prison"
"everything that characters and readers think that they’ve
safely left behind comes back with a vengeance"
"Ghosts, like gothics, disrupt our
sense of what is present and what is
past, what is ancient and what is
modern"