Gothic Keywords

ABSTRACTION

The Oxford English Dictionary records early 19th Century usage of

“abstraction” as secret or dishonest removal of wealth; “abstraction”
as the consideration of qualities independently of material
substance, especially concerning wealth and property, came into
use in the later part of the Century. Gothic narratives often explore
notions of fractured identities and a sense of dislocation that is
either or both spatial and psychological, but rising capitalism and
the abstraction of wealth from physical property was among the
biggest anxieties of the time, turning tangible security into an
ephemeral, easily transferable insecurity. Narratives like Jekyll and
Hyde, The Hound of the Baskervilles and Uncle Silas demonstrate
the temptation such wealth has for criminal activity. The Bottle Imp
gives a chilling account of how abstraction leads to a simultaneous
conflation of the ideas of wealth and happiness, and the abstraction
of self from society: one no longer feels any sense of responsibility
about the fate of others. Financial abstraction also blurs the
boundaries between social classes and even between races, since
wealth, in all its dangerous fluidity, levels the playing field and
contributing to late Victorian anxieties about the self and the
potential for displacement or even erasure. The Gothic authors’ use
of fragmentary, epistolary and therefore inherently unreliable
narratives (eg. Frankenstein; Dracula) can therefore be said to
reflect a desire to record the subjective and personal in an effort to
prevent the complete abstraction of the self.
(Annabelle Bok, 2006)

Androgyny
Androgyny took on a prominent place in describing the sexual
orientation of characters in fin de siêcle Gothic literature. In a
biological context, being androgynous suggests a combination of
male and female sexual organs and characteristics. In Gothic
literature, to be androgynous is to be neither specifically masculine
nor feminine thus creating an amorphous character with an
ambiguous sexual orientation. Some authors combine the biological
and social definitions of androgyny to the characterization of their
characters. Androgynous behaviour is exhibited in marginalized
characters such as the foreign other and females to mirror cultural
and sexual anxieties in this period of enormous social turbulence.
Androgyny is a fin de siêcle symptom exemplifying the Victorians’
frustration, confusion and resentment towards the strict
demarcation of gender roles. Gothic literature thus uses the site of
androgyny to contest with gender conventions and experiment with
mutable forms of sexuality. This is seen in recent times where
several feminists advocate androgyny as a substitute to patriarchy.
In Dracula, Bram Stoker describes Mina Harker as a motherly
female with a “woman’s heart” who interestingly, also has “man’s
brain.” Androgyny is also manifested in the hyper-masculine
Dracula who is also hyper-feminine at the same time. He is at once
the pursuer of virginal females and the pursued by a band of
masculine men. Hyde in Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Doctor
Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is feminized with his “dwarfish” stature.
Androgyny can then be seen as a projection of various anxieties in
the fin de siêcle Victorian period. This is due to the emergence of
the new woman, fall of the family and the questioning of
assumptions of being either man or woman in the Victorian society.
(Metta Yang, 2004)

Gothic Atavism
The term atavism is usually used to express the recurrence or
reappearance of certain ‘primitive’ traits, physical or psychical,
which presumably match those of an ancestral form. This notion of
reversion and evolutionary ‘throwbacks’ was closely linked to
criminality and class anxieties (see
http://www.criminology.fsu.edu/crimtheory/ lombroso.htm for
more information about Cesare Lombroso’s theory of the born
deviant) in the nineteenth century, and often serves an interesting
function mostly in fin de siecle gothic literature, particularly texts
(such as R.L Stevenson’s Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, A.C Doyle’s Hound
of the Baskervilles or H.G Well’s The Island of Dr Moreau) which
engage with bodily monstrosity and pseudo-scientific discourses
about degeneration.
Urban problems of rising crime and poverty, as well as post-
Darwinian anxieties about the increasing destabilization of human
identity in late Victorian society seem to become embodied and
‘safely’ displaced through the repugnant form of the regressive
atavistic human, whose moral and behavioral aberrations are pre-
figured through his/her animalistic physiognomy. As such, tropes
of degeneration such as blood, heredity, bestiality and even
crumbling structures or spaces that are tied to a stagnant but still
potent past frequently crop up in various gothic texts. In imperial-
colonial gothic discourse, these atavistic elements can be read as a
reflection of anxieties about the decay of the gentry and the
declining colonial enterprise.
Gothic narratives typically subvert and complicate these
conventional perceptions of the ‘social other’ by problematizing the
supposedly clear (but ultimately revealed as superficial or at the
least, unreliable) distinctness between the ‘proper’, respectable self
and its anti-thesis. Via characteristic gothic devices such as
doubling, irony and linguistic /narrative indeterminacy (which
highlight the uneasy closeness between these two binaristic
oppositions), the geographically, socially and/or biologically
transgressive figure of the atavist becomes even more perturbing
because he/she blurs the established boundaries drawn between
the civilized and the savage, mirroring back to society its own fears
and concerns (racial decline, the overlapping of animal and human,
etc). Thus, the atavistic being not only presents a direct threat to
civilization, but even more disturbingly, undermines the scientific
taxonomies and social classifications that it rests on from within.
For more detailed examples of such readings about the atavist’s
function in gothic literature, see Kelly Hurley’s The Gothic Body:
Sexuality, Materialism, and Degeneration at the ‘Fin de siecle’ or
Stephen Arata’s article The Sedulous ape: Atavism, Professionalism,
and Stevenson's 'Jekyll and Hyde.'

(Quek Sherlyn, 2004)

Beauty
Beauty is often juxtaposed to what is man-made or corrupted. Victor in
Frankenstein, in his scientific transgression, fails to enjoy the ‘charms of nature.’
(53) Hence it can be an indication of the state of one’s inner mind. The beauty of
nature is pervasive in Frankenstein and it contributes greatly to the sublime. There
is a sense of the overwhelming in its grandeur and infiniteness as compared to man
who is small. It acts as a refuge by diminishing man’s problems, but it can
accentuate them also because it is threatening and uncontrollable. Victor’s
escapade to Montanvert filled him with ‘sublime ecstasy that gave wings to the
soul, and allowed it to soar…’ (94) The mountains are ‘terrifically desolate’ yet
possessing a ‘solitary grandeur.’(94) Such a beautiful landscape becomes almost
paradoxical as it would witness Walton’s and Victor’s suffering travels across the
frozen seas, and its attractive-repulsion parallels the nature of the construction of
the monster as well-attractive, dangerous and uncontrollable.
Beauty is brought to perfection in women, who are likened to angels and
the Virgin Mary .They usually fit within moral and domestic conventions, like
Frankenstein’s Elizabeth and Dracula’s Mina. However, sensation and shock
tactics are created by defiling such women, and bringing to light the ideological
suppression of women in society. Beauty without morals or chastity becomes
unnatural and bestial, evoking attraction and repulsion. Beauty here is seen as
something to be feared due to its power to seduce and bring out the irrational in
man. Lucy possesses two faces of beauty within herself, the seductive and cold
beauty when she is a blood sucking vampire and the earthly and peaceful one when
she is truly dead as a virtuous woman. Similarly, Ollala’s beauty is that of
degeneration, like the house, and is an indication of illness, insanity or bestiality.
(Candida Ho, 2004)

Birth
Birth evolves in gothic literature as an overdetermined symbol stemming from
man’s darkest desires to overreach the boundaries of knowledge. A distortion of
the natural act of human creation, the emphasis on its agonized, painful labour
process functions as a perversion of nature in giving birth to all that is monstrous in
human nature outside the safety of the domestic sphere. The arduous process of
animating life in Frankenstein and Jekyll and Hyde manifests itself in the deformed
birth-child that results: which Frankenstein condemns as “a filthy creation… [a]
daemoniacal corpse to which I had so miserably given life” (56).
The trope of a deformed, perverted birth also has Biblical echoes, most evident
in the demonic trinity of Milton’s Paradise Lost, in which Sin is taken from Satan’s
head and the incestuous son of their union is torn out of her bowels. This is alluded
to in the reference to Hyde as a “child of Hell”, spawned from a division of evil
that tears away the darker desires embedded in his creator’s nature. It also
resonates with the birth of the gothic novel, as the creation of its authors’ restless
imaginations and underlying desires in a repressive society. Newfound impulses to
conquer science and control creation can also be read as the challenging of
authority, manifested in the birth of a rebellious self contesting religious and social
orthodoxy. The birth of the monster in Frankenstein thus becomes a metaphor for
the threatening figure of a working-class Everyman, who is nevertheless a product
of bourgeois authority as much as its enemy.
Birth also becomes enmeshed with larger societal anxieties stemming from
Malthus’s treaty on population explosion, in the Victorian fear that racial (and
social) Others would reproduce aggressively to threaten the existing power
structure, and taint racial purity. This is mirrored by Frankenstein’s fear that the
monster would reproduce. Ultimately, the distorted birth process that haunts the
gothic narrative is checked by the monstrous creation it releases: a mirror to the
darkest aspects of its creator.
Works cited:
Milton, John. Paradise Lost. Ed. Gordon Teskey. 3rd ed. (New York; London: W.
W. Norton, 2005).
Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein (London: Penguin Books, 1994).
Stevenson, Robert Louis. The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (London:
Penguin Books, 1994).
(Niroshi Sadanandan, 2006)

Blood
Blood, fundamentally used in horror literature as a gag factor
and ghastly presentation of gore and carnage, plays a far more
important and symbolic role in the arena of Gothic literature. It
spans a spectrum of socio-cultural associations and connotations
that is most aptly exemplified in Bram Stoker’s Dracula where the
legend of the vampire comes alive to plague modern Londoners and
deprive them of their life-blood and hence with it, all that blood
implies in Gothic literature. The theme of blood is present too,
though perhaps in a less obvious fashion in many other Gothic
novels though its delivery is far less overt in the ones that are bereft
of vampiric associations.
Due to the inextricable links between the Gothic tradition, the
Church and Christian doctrine, blood naturally represents life in
most of Gothic literature, for “the blood is the life”. Lucy slowly
grows more lifeless and more like the undead when Dracula starts
to feed on her and Mina suffers exactly same consequence, growing
paler each day as she is deprived of her life blood. Just as life is
drawn out by the simultaneous vampiric sucking of the blood, Lucy
grows healthier and more alive as she is given blood transfusions
from Quincy, Arthur, Seward and Van Helsing. More examples of
the links between blood and bodily functions reside in Frankenstein
where Victor learns constantly that the blood that runs within one’s
veins is the very foundation of life itself. The Creature that he
creates declares vengeance by demanding satiation through the
“blood of [his] remaining friends” (95).
Blood and especially the transference of blood are also
connotative of sexual intercourse and sacrifice. Arthur regards
himself as married to Lucy even without a proper ceremony because
his blood is within her body, unaware of course that Quincy and
Seward had also given her a blood transfusion. The transference
calls to mind a kind of exchange of bodily fluids and penetration, a
loss of one’s own essence and the gain of another’s that is very
symbolic of sexual intercourse. In this way blood is also linked to
identity, as the consumption of another’s blood makes one part of
the other, establishing a link, and for lack of a better term, blood
bond. Mina’s sucking of Dracula’s blood makes her less human and
more vampiric and Lucy’s taking of Dracula’s blood ultimately
transforms her into a vampire as well.
The importance of blood is hardly contested, but equally
important is the great fear of its loss. This fear of the loss of blood
itself translates into many inherent Gothic anxieties such as
xenophobia, fear of sexuality, fear of the Other, fear of death and
mortality etc. Immense loss of blood will inevitably herald death;
blood infusion from another will threaten and possibly subordinate
ones down identity, especially if the blood is from a foreigner. Fear
of giving blood indicates unwillingness to sacrifice, and fear of
sexuality which is indicative of impotence or lack of sexual prowess.
In both Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and Frankenstein, and needless to
say many other Gothic novels, the expression of blood running cold
in one’s veins is a definite signal of fear and dread. Having the blood
of a person on one’s hands is also a signal of guilt, most likely
because having deprived someone of his/her life-blood, one has
effectively killed the person.

Selected Bibliography

Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein. Great Britain: Pan Books, 1994.

(Adeline Hoe, 2004).

Gothic BLOOD: Desiring the RED

The significance of blood in gothic literature can be illustrated in
many aspects. At the elementary level, blood denotes genealogy,
lineages and procreation. This denotation has historical significance
for the gothic text to either construct or recall its origins. Extending
genealogy to the family, what we often associate as ‘blood is thicker
than water’ is challenged in the gothic texts like Mary Shelley’s
Frankenstein and Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde
that foreground certain anxieties within the family structure such
as in the relationships between fathers and sons, husbands and
wives.
What we know as ‘blue blood’ reminds us at once of the
aristocracy and nobility. The gothic texts in the Victorian era were
concerned with the rise of the bourgeois class, a liminal force itself
that threatened to destabilise the ruling power of the former elite.
Therefore, the gothic treatment of blood sometimes focuses on the
purity and tainted ness of blood like in Bram Stoker’s Dracula to
highlight then contemporary societal anxieties.
Blood, due to its ability to be transfused between humans, can
be treated as a transactional currency in the gothic text as
exemplified in Stoker’s Dracula. This co-modification of blood is
highly significant as it reflects the anxiety of the genre towards
increasing dominion of capitalism and industrialisation especially in
the 19th century that threatened traditional ways of life.
Blood in the gothic text can too connote sexuality and the libido.
In Dracula, Dracula and his thirst for blood highlight a libidinous
nature that arises from his ‘eastern’ hence different origins. Blood
has the further implications of gender and race as despite its
physical omnipresence between genders and across races, the
perceptions of blood cannot but be influenced by perceptions of
race and gender.
The ambivalence of blood’s dual functionality as a life-giver and
yet also a life-denier highlights the liminal space that blood
occupies in the gothic genre. Stoker’s Dracula is the epitome of a
character who both denies and yet gives ‘life’ to his victims. The
‘liminality’ of blood, along with other gothic motifs such as the dual-
door house in Stevenson’s Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and Victor’s
ambivalent monster in Frankenstein who is both inhumane yet
humane are all characteristic of the genre.
The notion of blood as a life-giver is further extended by the
religious connotations of blood itself. The blood of Biblical Christ
who had sacrificed himself on the cross for mankind’s salvation had
been subverted in Stoker’s Dracula when Dracula, now possibly
perceived as the Anti-Christ who consumes his victim’s blood
instead of giving blood for salvation.
Without doubt, we need the bloody key to open the door to the
gothic world.
(James Tan, 2004)

Boundaries
Anne Williams in her book The Art of Darkness: A Poetics of Gothic suggests that
Gothic literature is “pervasively organized around anxieties about boundaries (and
boundary transgressions)” (Williams 16). Gothic literature, however, deals not
only with boundaries (and transgressions) of “self and other”; it attempts also to
show the problematic nature of boundaries in the first place. Social boundaries, for
example, define what is correct, but at the same time repress the individual.
Boundaries in Gothic fiction are often blurred, and things are never as clearly
defined as they seem.
The establishment of the boundary between the self and other is important in
Gothic fiction for everything that the Self is not is projected onto the Other. In
Shelley’s Frankenstein, Frankenstein’s monster is clearly the Other for he, at least
physically, has come to represent everything that the other normal looking
characters are not. The idea of “self and other” extends also to geographical
boundaries, where everything within the boundary of civilized world is good and
everything beyond it is either seen as exotic or dangerous. In Stoker’s Dracula,
London is seen as civilized and safe (at least prior the arrival of Dracula) and
everything in Romania is considered to be dark, ominous and dangerous.
Boundaries create distinction, but they are also repressive in nature. Society lays
down certain norms (boundaries) that individuals cannot transgress or risk being
termed the ‘Other’. People in attempting to stay within these boundaries naturally
have to repress any desires that may transgress these socially placed boundaries. It
can be argued that Dr. Jekyll’s creation Mr. Hyde is an attempt to remain
respectable at all times, as defined by the societal boundaries.
Lastly, boundaries can be blurred as we see in Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, for is it
really possible to create a boundary within oneself? The fact the Jekyll goes to bed
as himself and wakes up as Hyde suggests that not only are boundaries
problematic, it can also be easily blurred. Dracula too, represents a blurring of the
boundaries between the living and the dead, He is not dead, but he is not alive as
well, hence he is called the “Un-Dead”, which is really an oxymoron.
Boundaries are endless in Gothic fiction; they constantly attempt to define what
is correct, known and approved, but at the same time create more problems by their
very act of categorization.
(Ivan Ang, 2006)

The Gothic City

The city emerged as a threatening social space in nineteenth-century Britain,
particularly in the century’s latter half, when urbanization saw the majority of the
population moving into the cities. Urban gothic literature reflects the anxieties of
urbanization by representing the relationship of the individual to the city.
The gothic city is a nightmarish space which threatens one’s sense of self. It is
replete with the problems of urbanity: rising crime, declining morality and the
blurring of social boundaries. The city’s architecture is monstrous and inherently
paradoxical: it is constructed by man, and yet its labyrinthine alleys remain
unknowable, thus giving rise to the uncanny. This is compounded by the city’s
ruins which symbolize moral decay; while the city is organic and constantly
growing, the architectural ruins shadow it with a sense of death. The gothic city is
thus causative and symbolic of the threats to the individual and his alienation in an
urban setting. This leads to the loss of identity, as dramatized in Stevenson’s The
Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886), where Jekyll’s split identity
indicates a fragmented sense of self.
The city is also a space of evil. This is unlike earlier Gothic writing like The Castle
of Otranto (1764) where evil was displaced to foreign locales like Italy. In contrast,
the vampire’s invasion of urban London in Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) literally
brings the horror “home”. The city is used to confront the individual with the idea
that evil is not externalized elsewhere, but rather literally exists within.
(Erin Woodford, 2006)

Death
Gothic literature is obsessed with death. We find portents of death,
unnatural deaths, and series of deaths (e.g. Frankenstein), all of
which contribute to an atmosphere of horror. Death in Gothic
literature is associated with the supernatural. If Gothic literature
reflects a wish to overcome one’s mortality, there is also a fear of
those who somehow manage to transcend it e.g. She, vampires,
Frankenstein’s monster.
In Gothic literature, death is horrific because it is often not quite
the end. This thwarts the human wish for certainty. The vampires
who are Undead occupy a liminal space; they are at once both alive
and dead. The vampire hunters in Dracula have to drive a stake
into them, to make sure they are really dead. There is also the trope
of the dead who return e.g. Poe’s “Ligeia”. These kinds of spectres
can also be seen as manifestations of the return of the repressed.
Likewise, the subject of death itself has often been ignored or
repressed. It is what is unknown, and poses a threat to the
Victorian mind which desires order. The Gothic is interested in
what has been glossed over. We don’t really get sentimental scenes
like the death of little William in East Lynne; rather, the more
gruesome, inexplicable aspects of death are explored. The
corporeality of the body is emphasised with gory descriptions of
blood and grave worms. Reading about death serves as a reminder
of one’s mortality.
There is also a Gothic obsession with the bodies of dead women.
Poe said that the death of a beautiful woman is “the most poetical
topic in the world”. For a discussion on death, femininity and the
aesthetic, see Elizabeth Bronfen’s book Over her Dead Body. She
suggests that Gothic writing itself may be an act of killing off the
female as it transmits the animate body into inanimate text.
Necrophiliac desire for the dead woman e.g. Heathcliff’s digging of
Catherine’s grave, also points to other kinds of transgressions e.g.
incest.

(Khoo Lilin, 2004)

Deformity
The Oxford English Dictionary defines “deformity” as “the quality or condition of
being misshapen, or marred in appearance”, where the word connotes moral
disfigurement. On top of that, the Latin form of “deform”, its root word, also
implies disgracefulness.
Deformity is abundant in the gothic, especially as monstrosity, ugliness and
moral disfigurement. In a romantic gothic novel like Frankenstein, the monster
embodies deformity with its hideousness where its misshapen form results from an
integration of body parts from different corpses. Besides, the narrative is an
amalgamation of different textual elements from sources like the bible and The
Ancient Mariner among many others, which are distorted.
On the other hand, in a fin de siêcle gothic novel like Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde,
deformity is present in the atavistic and ugly appearance of Hyde, whereas there is
suggestion of moral disfigurement in all the characters, including professionals like
Utterson, who was wandering on the streets in the “small hours” (25). Besides, the
narrator who conceals, and the society that is so secretive, where Hyde
(homonymic for “hide” though also having other implications like “Hyde Park”
etc) embodies that secrecy, highlights how the gothic aims to uncover the disguise
for deformity or disgracefulness in society.
Through deformity, the gothic novel interrogates society and its failure to
recognise its inherent short-comings, as can be seen by how the monster and Hyde
are foils for many other characters in their respective novels, so as to bring about a
greater level of self-reflexivity in a world where all negative aspects are projected
unto the “Other”.
(Pang Shi Hua, 2006)

DISLOCATION
“Dislocation” is the destabilising effect caused by fundamentally
unstable and cryptic gothic narratives in its fragmentary epistolary
forms such as “Frankenstein” where letters from the no man’s land
of the Arctic may never reach Margaret, or in the heteroglossic
narration of “Dracula” which is made up of curiously collated
newspaper reports, unopened letters and supposedly private
journals. The avoidance of a neat arranging of elements and
reassuring endings in gothic narratives leads to the desired
dislocation of perspectives and ultimately the disturbance of a
smooth reading experience as perhaps part of gothic narrative’s
agenda to challenge assumptions of normalcy in the linear
narration and neat resolution of social realist novels. This
destabilizing reading experience can be aided by the technique of
either the lack of omniscient narrators in both “Frankenstein” and
“Dracula” as an objective and cohesive voice pulling together the
different articles with its comments or by problematizing the
omniscient voice in “Jekyll and Hyde” that frustrates the reader in
its deliberate effacement at times.
The abstraction of the gothic narrative form often parallels the
story’s concerns and anxieties when confronting gothic themes
which are notorious for its inability to pin down a stable center of
meaning hence also resulting in the pathological effect of
dislocation. This is exemplified in the split into “self” and “other”
when societal demands are unable to be reconciled with individual
impulses especially in the urban gothic tale of “Jekyll and Hyde”.
However when the boundaries of self/other collapses as when it
gets progressively difficult to control the figure of the “Other”/ Hyde,
so does it become even more impossible to locate stable identities.
The collapse of any single, firm definition is also manifested in
gothic fiction’s use of overdetermined symbols such as “blood” in
“Dracula” which furthers the notion of the genre’s multiplicity. It
may be impossible to fix gothic fiction with a stable meaning
however one might say that the dislocation of the reader from a
fixed vantage point paradoxically jars one into a greater critical
engagement with all elements of the text.

(Belinda Loh Mei Lin, 2004)

Doppelgänger
Translated from German as “Double-goer”
Originating from Johann Paul Friedrich Richter’s story
Siebenkas, the doppelgänger motif was vaguely explained by Richter
in German as “so heissen sie Leute die sie selbst sehen,” translating
into “So people who sees themselves are called”. The term describes
a duality of the self in which a shadow, or an alter-ego, manifests
itself to the original subject, and the subject has a simultaneous
consciousness of being both his present self and the external other
observing himself. Horror is produced at the recognition of seeing
oneself from an external position, in the realization that a tragic
figure that the subject has been observing is actually that of his
own. The projection of fear and anxiety to an external agent returns
to haunt the subject in this fashion, as exemplified by Heinrich
Heine’s poem taking the term as its title:
A man stands here too, staring up into space
And wrings his hands with the strength of his pain
It chills me, when I behold his pale face
For the moon shows me my own features again!
This horror is also heightened by the sense of uncanny or the
‘Unheimlich’ that Freud interpreted in his theory of the ‘Uncanny’
as aspects of things familiar to us which becomes distorted and are
made strange. Dread is intensified as a result of discovering a
familiarity to that what was feared, the subject realizing that the
fear was inherently innate in his psychology. Citing the example of
ETA Hoffmann’s story The Sandman, the fear Nathaniel bears for
the Coppelius the Sandman as a threatening figure is reawakened
by a doubling of this evil with the appearance of Coppola the glass-
maker.
In other literary instances, the doppelgänger motif brings about the
fear of identity theft with the startling appearance of an identical
other who has subversive or malicious intentions. In Wilkie Collin’s
Woman in White, Laura Fairlie’s had her identity exchanged by her
double Anne Catherick upon the latter’s death, resulting in her
incarceration in the asylum when her real upper-class identity
being misappropriated. With The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr.
Hyde, the double comes from a division of the self, the two egos
representing opposing figures of a good-evil dichotomy. Here, the
respectable Dr Jekyll slowly loses his sense of self-identity with the
severing of his psyche into two disparate halves, and Mr Hyde
conversely beginning to take over the Dr Jekyll’s life.
Under a doubled association, literary characters can encounter
or mirror an opposite figure in significant actions, with the parallel
motion of the two usually indicating an implicit similarity and
inescapable relationship between the two. Despite being two
characters opposing each other in Dracula, Van Helsing and
Dracula bears similar traits of being foreign and authoritative
father-figures to the other characters, their identification asserting
the same inherent desire for power and control.
The literary Gothic’s interest in the doppelgänger highlights the
period’s interest in the exploration of the psychopathological nature
of man, in its scientific search for the basis of fear and dread in the
psyche. The notion of a unified and stable psychology of the self is
destabilized when the unconscious overcomes the ego in responding
to primitive fears of identity loss and disembodiment of the soul
from the body. An element of the uncanny and the macabre is thus
presented in gothic texts where the doppelgänger appears, by
blurring of the boundaries between the dream state and reality,
sanity and madness, introducing subjectivity into what we perceive
the external world really is.

(Ong Yong Hui, 2004)

Gothic Doubling
Doubling refers to a multiplication by two, such as when two or
more characters parallel each other in action or personality, for
example. It can also mean internal doubling, or division within the
self to exhibit a duality of character.
Often, seemingly disparate characters are shown through
doubling to be fundamentally similar, hence collapsing the self-
other dichotomy and imparting a worrying sense of
indistinguishableness between the supposed opposites. This implies
that boundaries between deliberately demarcated groups of people
are actually slippery and unstable. External identity markers such
as dressing and mannerisms are hence undependable, allowing
social categories to become permeable and vulnerable to
transgression by virtue of their easy imitation.
Doubling hence illustrates deep anxieties that Victorian elites
had regarding the weakening of the distinctions drawn along lines
of class, gender, race and nationality, posing threats to the interests
of the self. It also raises a cautionary point that a thin line
separates good and evil, and while it is easy for evil to infiltrate
one’s protected sanctum, it is equally easy for one to fall into the
latter’s trappings. As such, everything that seems good must also be
held in suspicion of harboring a negative underside.
Doubling also foregrounds the motif of mirroring, in particular
the projection of one’s fears, desires and anxieties onto the other,
which becomes an uncomfortable reflection of ugly traits that the
self refuses to acknowledge. The other thus reveals the social ills
and moral decay that high Victorian society tries to ignore. It also
broaches the notion that there are always two sides to a coin, such
as that crime and poverty would necessarily accompany wealth
accumulation in a capitalistic society. Progress for some comes at
the cost of hardship for many others.
At the individual level, doubling plays out an internal splitting of
the self between the public face of high Victorian respectability and
professionalism, versus the carefully hidden face of despicability
and immorality. It makes an oblique reference to Victorian
hypocrisy, duplicity of standards and multiplicity of facades, as well
as the fear of being discovered as such. It also dramatizes the inner
struggle and vacillation between choices of good and evil in the
individual. It is also interesting to note that for particular groups,
doubling shows the essential sameness of perception by society of
their status. Gothic representations of female characters for
example, almost always seem to double each other in their
stereotypical portrayal of feminine passivity when confronted with
masculine power.
Lastly, at the narrative level, the form and structure of gothic
writings sometimes act as a double to the content of the novel,
underscoring the importance of themes that are doubled (reiterated
through form and content), and the narrative strategy of doubling
itself.
(Diana Chan Tsui Li, 2004)

Gothic Doubling
The concept of doubling in Gothic literature proves significantly
revealing in the interrogation of the established social norms of the
Victorian society in the 19th century. Relevant and applicable at
both the individual and societal levels, Gothic “doubling” in itself
suggests an implicit lack of oneness, thereby plainly suggesting an
inherent instability or uncertainty found within the characters and
their environments in the Gothic novel. This concept manifests as
readers recognise the implied and inherent similarities between
even seeming polar opposites, for example between the civilised and
the savage, good and evil, creator and created etc, the degree of
horror, so characteristic of Gothic novels, is heightened.
The massive social change and flux during the Victorian Gothic
period made this destabilising Gothic notion of “doubling”
particularly significant. Indeterminacy and uncertainty arose from
core societal problems as socio-economic forces took shape to
change living and working conditions. For example, the rise of the
working class generated anxieties about uncontrolled reproduction
and the blurring of class boundaries. Socio-economic and cultural
tensions were exacerbated by other concerns such as the growing
interest in travel (thereby inducing a threat to England’s cultural
imperialism), as well as the rise of capitalism that created fears of
displacement and class exploitation.
In its interrogation of accepted social conventions, the concept of
“doubling” functions as a tool through which a mirroring of society’s
problems reflect and reveal deep-seated insecurities of the Victorian
era. Amongst other concerns was that of the bipolar dichotomy
between Self and Other, which is associated with fear and disdain
of the racial or foreign Other-- so attributed with corruption and
decadence and perceived as seeking to undermine England’s
cultural superiority. Yet, this issue was inextricably bound to the
perception of a declining English aristocracy that had been
upstaged by changing social forces and was no longer able to hold
its own in a rapidly changing society in the midst of a profound
transition. This becomes a common trope in Gothic novels such as
Sheridan Le Fanu’s Uncle Silas and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein,
where figures such as Madame de la Rougierre and the Monster as
foreign Others pose a threat to the now declining and impotent
aristocratic class of the Frankensteins and the Ruthyns by
disrupting their family peace and honour. Within the study and
categorisation of the Othered figures then lay the answers to
Victorian societal weaknesses.
Thus, that which might be assumed to be orthodox and accepted in
society is subverted within Gothic literature through “doubling”. By
showing different characters that demonstrate frighteningly similar
actions and character traits, e.g. Dracula and Van Helsing, both of
whom can be read as intruders of domestic peace and sanctity, or
different environments that are nonetheless reflective of the same
social stratification problem, e.g. the prestigious grounds of Knowl
and the dilapidated estate of Bartram Haugh, the loopholes and
anxieties of Victorian society are shown up in the mirroring of
“doubled” actions and characterisations.
(Joanne Raj, 2004)

The Doppelganger in the Gothic

In Irish folklore the doppelganger is also known as a fetch, but
translated from its original German, it literally means ‘double’
(doppel) ‘walker’ (ganger). In the literary vernacular, it has come to
refer to the double of a person, usually in relation to great evil. Most
Gothic narratives portray the doppelganger to be mischievous and
malicious. In science fiction and fantasy narratives, they appear as
shapeshifters who mimic a particular person or species to serve
their own evil purposes.
In a Gothic text, the appearance of the doppelganger possesses
great significance because of its cultural codifications of being an
alter ego or antithetical character to the literary protagonist – an
evil twin, so to speak. Though the ‘twin effect’ of the doppelganger
suggests physical features identical to that of the self, this is not
always the case, as in Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr Jekyll and Mr
Hyde, where Jekyll in the misguided dream of splitting the self into
its good and evil halves to remove the evil nature of humans,
creates Hyde – Jekyll’s doppelganger in personality, though
physically contrary in appearance. Where Jekyll is “a large, well
made, smooth-faced man… with every mark capacity and
kindness”, Hyde is “pale and dwarfish, he gave an impression of
deformity without any nameable malformation, he had a displeasing
smile”, and Mr Utterson even describes him as “troglodytic”. As
Jekyll himself writes, “even as good shone upon the countenance of
the one, evil was written broadly and plainly on the face of the
other.”
As the spiritual or ghostly counterpart of a living person, the
doppelganger is a shadow of the self that accompanies every
human. Hyde is Jekyll’s ‘shadow’, a personification of the repressed
evil nature that all humans possess. Generally, doppelgangers are
visible only to their owners; symbolically, this means that only its
owner can see it for what it truly is – and characteristic of this, only
Jekyll knows Hyde’s true identity. They cast no shadow or reflection
in a mirror or water (when Jekyll is Jekyll, he sees only Jekyll and
not Hyde) and are also supposed to provide advice to the person
they shadow, but this advice could be misleading or malicious
(Hyde constantly tempts Jekyll to drink the potion that will lead to
the metamorphosis). In rare instances, they could also plant false
ideas in a person’s mind or appear before friends and relatives,
causing confusion (Hyde appears before Jekyll’s friends and pass
himself off as Jekyll when he signs cheques). Another aspect of the
doppelganger theme is that if the doppelganger and the self were to
meet, they would both die (the conflict between Jekyll and Hyde
eventually destroys them both because the individual is unable to
co-exist with his doppelganger).
Doppelgangers can therefore be said to be extracts of what is
undesirable in humans and society. As such they are antithetical
evil twins who threaten to undermine and take over society if left
unchecked and uncontrolled – projections of all that is evil in the
nature of humans. Hyde is a personification of all that is evil in
human nature – violent, cruel, voluptuous in desires, and as a
result, is the doppelganger not only of Jekyll but of society.
(Melissa Chew, 2004)

Doppelgänger
This word is derived from German. ‘Doppel’ means ‘double’ and
‘gänger’ literally means ‘goer’. The Doppelgänger is a supernatural
figure that doubles living people. In some ghost stories, the
Doppelgänger would appear beside a person and imitate everything
that person is doing. There are also tales where a Doppelgänger is
shown to be a projection from the future warning one of an evil that
is about to befall one.
In Gothic literature, the Doppelgänger becomes very significant.
Frequently, it is the projection of the suppressed self, possibly the
id in psychoanalytical theory. It becomes a representation of that
which is usually kept hidden, but is now revealed. The
Doppelgänger hence becomes the alter ego.
Therefore, we could say that Hyde was Dr Jekyll’s Doppelgänger,
as he represents the personification of what Dr Jekyll had to
suppress within himself to survive in the hypocrisy of Victorian
society. Likewise, the monster is Frankenstein’s Doppelgänger as it
represents Frankenstein’s desire to overcome death.
 The Doppelgänger gives us the eerie feeling of looking into a
mirror and seeing a place where all is reversed. Likewise in Gothic
novels, events occur in a paralleling manner, both to create an
aesthetic of confusion and multiplicity, as well as to mirror that
which is happening in society but is swept under the carpet for the
sake of decorum. Hence in the novel ‘Dracula’ by Bram Stoker,
Dracula and Van Helsing, in a strange way, appear to be each
other’s Doppelgänger, as they have striking similarities in spite of
being placed in opposite poles.
(Nandabalan Panneerselvam, 2004)

Dreams
Literally, dreams refer to the images that form in an individual’s mind when he or
she is asleep. Figuratively however, dreams signify the inner most, repressed
desires of an individual. Dreams can reveal the sexual desires of an individual
bound by the rules in society. For example, in Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Jonathan,
finding himself in a dream-like state and surrounded by three attractive women,
confesses that he feels a “wicked, burning desire” to be kissed by these women.
While reality is such that Victorian society demands that he keeps his passions
restrained, his dream involving the women, reflects his desire to transgress such
societal rules. Meanwhile, for Lucy, it is in her unconscious, sleepwalking state
that she meets Dracula. We can consider Lucy’s “rendezvous” with the Count as
her secret desire to break away from the constraints of Victorian society. In doing
so, she has the freedom to romance a man who is not even among her three
existing suitors. Dreams can also mirror one’s fears. In Frankenstein, Victor
dreams of Elizabeth, whose lips “became livid with the hue of death” and who then
transforms into his mother’s corpse. This dream perhaps, points out the secret,
subconscious repulsion that Victor has towards Elizabeth, or his longing for his
dead mother, or both. Dreams also strangely foreshadow events to come. We see
this later when the three vampires seduce Van Helsing, just like how they seduced
Jonathan, and also when Elizabeth literally dies on her wedding night.
(Anna Mathew, 2006)

Entrapment
Entrapment, a favourite horror device of the Gothic, means to be
confined or to be trapped in such a way that there is no way out. It
is this sense of there being no escape that contributes to the
claustrophobic psychology of Gothic space. The notion of
claustrophobia is closely tied up with that of entrapment. Although
it is most often regarded as a consequence of physical entrapment,
it can also be more generally attributed to a character’s sense of
helplessness, or a feeling that one is caught up in some sinister
plan or destiny over which one has no control.
There are essentially three types of entrapment: physical,
mental, and existential. Physical entrapment would mean being
physically trapped in some place. A recurring gothic device of
physical entrapment is that of the protagonist trapped in a maze of
some kind and trying to escape, but inevitably returning to the
same spot again and again. An example of physical entrapment can
be found in Stoker’s Dracula. When Harker is being driven to the
castle of Dracula, he experiences a moment of being physically
trapped in the nightmare landscape of the Transylvania, as is
evident in his remark that “[it] seemed to me that we were simply
going over and over the same ground again; and so I took note of
some salient point, and found that this was so” (Stoker). Another
example of such entrapment is found in Smith’s A Rendezvous in
Averiogne. In this short story, the protagonist Gerard is trying in
vain to escape from a forest; he returns, inevitably, to the same spot
every time. Eventually, “[his] very will was benumbed, was crushed
down as by the incumbence of a superior volition” (Smith).
Mental entrapment, on the other hand, is about being confined
to a certain state of mind. The gothic trope of madness, for example,
is a form of mental entrapment. In a way, the insane are trapped in
their own mental universe, into which no one else can penetrate.
Renfield, in Dracula, is doubly entrapped; physically locked up in
an asylum, he is also limited to the confines of his mental universe,
doomed to be continually misunderstood by Seward, or simply
dismissed as insane.
Lastly, there is also existential entrapment, which takes the form
of social entropy and ontological or epistemological entrapment. An
example of existential entrapment can be found in Stevenson’s The
Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde; Dr Jekyll feels trapped by
societal notions of respectability, by a constant pressure of having
to uphold his reputation as a gentleman in the eyes of the Victorian
public. As a way of breaking out of this ‘prison’, Dr Jekyll invents
the figure of Hyde. Hyde is therefore Jekyll’s liberator, for it is as
Hyde that Dr Jekyll can truly express himself, unbound by
considerations of maintaining his respectability.

(Esther Leong, 2004)

Entrapment
The notion of entrapment is a prevalent motif in gothic literature.
There are two main types of entrapment which can be observed in
such works: physical and psychological entrapment of the
character(s).
Physical entrapment occurs when a character’s body is
constrained within a particular physical setting and he is unable to
get himself out of that setting. Such is the case when
Frankenstein’s monster is entrapped in a body which Frankenstein
had created for him.
Psychological entrapment is manifested in the form of
inescapable, agonizing tensions within a character’s mind. For
example, Frankenstein is psychologically entrapped when he has to
make a decision either to create a female monster or risk his family
being murdered by his original monster.
The entrapment of characters in gothic literature mirrors the
entrapment faced by individuals in the Victorian society. These
individuals were entrapped because they were forced to repress
certain desires that they had, for example, sexual desires, in order
to observe strict Victorian social decorum and rules and work
towards an ordered society.
Besides being entrapped in such an oppressive society, the
Victorians may have also found themselves entrapped in a rapidly
changing world. With the onset of urbanization, the Industrial
Revolution and the Financial Revolution, they might have felt
entrapped as they were unable to escape the resulting changes that
were taking place.
On another level, the readers of gothic literature might feel a
sense of entrapment too because they are forced to accept the
typical presence of the uncanny, the supernatural, and other
unfamiliar elements coupled with secrecy and the withholding of
certain facts in the literature. For instance, when one reads The
Strange Case of Dr.Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, one might feel entrapped
when the story does not reveal facts such as the identity of the
omniscient narrator or the real reason for Hyde murdering Sir
Danvers Carew.
(Claudine Fernandez, 2006)

(The Economical) Family

Industrial development in the Nineteenth century encouraged
urbanization and by 1850 more than half of England lived in cities
and worked in industries. This changing economic condition
inevitably challenged conventional ideology of the family which
became redefined to include members “whether actually living
together or not” and “connected by (either) blood or affinity” (OED).
By this definition, the patriarchal figure became freed from
monogamy. Dracula, as symbol of the new money-obsessed class,
had three vampire wives. Similarly, with ready money, many figures
of authority were in command of the imp-child. Instead of a
genealogical right, the new capitalist society allows wealth to gain
patriarchal authority over many.
While the new factory communities introduced new figures of
authority, with respect to cloth and steel, production becomes
increasingly specifically gendered. Through personifying industrial
production, Gothic tropes seem to suggest via Frankenstein and
Dracula that while possible, the resultant single-parent offspring
are unnatural and terrifying.
At the same time, economically active working class women and
the ‘masculine’ New Woman threatened conventional notions of
feminine dependency. Writers like Stevenson reacted by only
presenting negative working women (in both sense of the word)
while Stoker singles intellectual Mina out for Dracula’s sanction.
Proliferation of child labor positioned children as ‘property
generating property’ as exemplified in The Bottle Imp. Dracula’s
brute beast children also aid his creation of vampire children. The
horror of the four female vampires’ feeding off children is an implicit
gothic comment on the inhumane nature of this exploitation.
Resources:
Oxford English Dictionary. http://oed.com.libproxy1.nus.edu.sg/
Emayzine.com. http://www.emayzine.com/lectures/indust~2.htm
(Yao Lingyun, 2006)

Female Sexuality
Aspects of female sexuality figure prominently in gothic literature
insofar as there is a strong preoccupation with what may happen if
female sexuality is not contained within the structures of
patriarchal authority across many Gothic texts. The highly
disturbing image of Lucy the “Un-Dead” throwing the child whom
she was cradling in her arms earlier on onto the hard ground
without so much as a blink in the eye in Bram Stoker’s Dracula
(1897) encapsulates one example of such a preoccupation—that of
motherhood gone wrong. The mother-child relationship—one that is
usually regarded as nurturing and loving—is violently destabilized
at this instance where Lucy—as the symbolic mother—harms the
child whom she was supposed to be protecting. Relating to
motherhood, the theme of birth signals the preoccupation with the
unknownable dimensions of female sexuality that many Gothic
texts exhibit. In Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1831), the birth of
Victor Frankenstein’s creation is depicted as one that is monstrous
insofar as it is “unnatural”; Frankenstein is, symbolically, both
father and mother to the creation that he abhors from the moment
of its birth. Given that it was a woman who authored Frankenstein,
this then signals how female sexuality—in all its different aspects—
was very much on the minds of both men and women in Victorian
Britain. When seen alongside the socio-cultural-historical
developments in Victorian Britain, it becomes possible then to view
the depictions of female sexuality in gothic literature as responses
to women’s increasing freedom and mobility during this period;
Mina Harker in Dracula, for instance, is very much a response to
the New Woman phenomenon.
(Ashley Lin, 2006)

Fin-de-Siecle Gothic
Literally meaning “end of century”, fin-de-siecle gothic refers
specifically to the gothic literature of the last two to three decades of
the 19th century. There is a pervading sense of instability and
unease, such that it was felt an age was coming to an end and
things would change, not necessarily for the better. This is reflected
by the idea of human devolution, seen in Stevenson’s Olalla, where
we are able to see the full effects of the devoluted foreign family in
the figure of the mother and brother. In Stevenson’s Jekyll and
Hyde, it is made worse because the upper-crust Dr. Jekyll
transforms himself into the degenerate Hyde. This choice, however,
is gradually taken away from him, and he loses control so that he
becomes involuntarily trapped in the form (and personality) of
Hyde.
Something else we may see in this is the idea of destabilizing loss of
control, not only in the personal sphere, but also in terms of the
imperial empire and its inability to ultimately control the Hyde-like
natives. The fatalistic sense that the civilised Jekyll would be
subsumed by Hyde, taken in this colonial context, suggested a
strong belief that Jekyll would have done better not to indulge in
Hyde, but should have remained with the civilised elite who were
his friends.
Anxieties about the city and its future are also a feature, in the
recurring image of a threatening cityscape that is always possessed
of a dark underside capable of hiding characters like Stoker’s
Dracula and Stevenson’s Hyde. The foreign threat appears in
Dracula, who not only threatens the loss of life, and civilised living
but also the women, so that the very future of the city is one of
parasitical creatures who are sired by a foreign menace. The twofold
threat here is thus not only that of diluting racial bloodlines, but
also of losing the culture of this city to the lesser foreign type.

(Kimberly Chaw Lock Wai, 2004)

Gothic Fog
An important element of the narrative and thematic landscapes across gothic
literature is the recurring appearance of the fog. The fog is prominently invoked
across the multiple Gothic ‘types’, which vary from the ‘Old Gothic’, of which the
novels of Horace Walpole are an example; the ‘new Gothic’, as exemplified by
works like Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein; the ‘fin-de-siecle Gothic’ in the detective
fiction of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle; to the ‘modernist Gothic’ aesthetics of T. S.
Eliot’s The Waste Land. The fog, very generally, serves two primary functions in
gothic fiction. The first of these would be its use as a formal property of or device
within the narrative. Since the fog is a naturally occurring phenomenon which may
be neither contained nor controlled, it becomes an effectively ambiguous or
sometimes ambivalent (it is exterior to law and morality) means for abetting or
protracting plotlines. In Conan Doyle’s The Hound of the Baskervilles for instance,
it aids the criminal’s escape, yet at the same time becomes ultimately responsible
for his death, while remaining inculpable. Secondly, Gothic fiction tends to be
heavily punctuated by the richly suggestive metaphorical qualities of the fog,
particularly in the ways it accentuates - not exclusively - the senses of mystery,
intrigue, horror and the sublime. Its appearance in Frankenstein’s exterior
landscapes evokes its sublime quality, casting upon the landscape the air of the
ineffable and unknowable. It is, at the same time a shroud that prevents clarity and
knowledge, suggestive of the way it enforces a metaphorical ‘blindness’, which
reappears close to a century later in Eliot’s The Waste Land. Bram Stoker’s
Dracula is similarly endowed, but in this work the fog takes on a miasmatic
presence in the ways it encircles terror, the supernatural, and death. Robert Louis
Stevenson, in The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, reworks the fog into
his urbanscape to heighten the inscrutability and unease of human concentrations
in city spaces. The fog has persistently endured through most ‘Gothicisms’, its
literal and connotative aspects perfect allies for representing, heightening, and
accentuating the Gothic poetics of the uncertain, the uncanny and the ineffable.
(Terry Tay, 2004)

Gothic Fog
The gothic fog is a physical manifestation of all the unwanted consequences of the
Industrial Revolution on the nineteenth-century cityscape. The new industries that
were mushrooming around the city belched out smoke and exhaust gases that
polluted its landscape and resulted in many bodily afflictions for its residents.
Hence, with modern technologies came the simultaneous rise of the “sickly city”
and environmental degradation, two of many adversities resulting from
industrialization.
The pervasiveness of the fog—as seen in R. L. Stevenson’s Dr Jekyll and Mr
Hyde—also suggests that the city is becoming an inescapable entity which one is
forced to contend with. The fog will permeate the countryside just as the city will
encroach upon even the farthest boundaries of the land. Even the human form is
not spared from the harmful residual effects of the burgeoning modern city. A
person’s constant inhalation of the foggy air may corrupt his senses, creating the
ghastly “monsters” that we see in much of gothic literature.
Because the fog also obscures one’s vision and hides things from view, it also
becomes a criminal ally to the deceptiveness of the city, whose architecture is full
of secret alleyways and unseen street corners. The blurry fog therefore fuels the
feelings of suspicion and mistrust among the city dwellers, because one can no
longer perceive another person’s true nature, just as how the city’s physical
landscape has been irretrievably tainted with the fog.
(Hanna Maryam, 2006)

Hero/Villain
At once seductive and repulsive, the hero/villain is a classic figure in gothic
fiction; certainly one of the most easily recognizable pieces of machinery in the
grab bag of devices that make up the gothic convention. So intrinsic is he to gothic
fiction that Leslie Fiedler has been led to claim, somewhat mistakenly, “that the
hero-villain is indeed an invention of the gothic form.” With his roots in Milton’s
Satan, the sentimental hero of the eighteenth century and the Byronic hero, the
hero/villain can be seen in the likes of Beckford’s Vathek, Walpole’s Manfred,
Lewis’ Ambrosio, Shelley’s Frankenstein and Stevenson’s Jekyll.
What makes the hero/villain so thoroughly attractive is precisely his duality of
nature. A morally ambiguous, contradictory personality, the hero/villain is a figure
torn by the conflict of good and evil within him. An exploration of the nature of
man and his psychology, the hero/villain can perhaps be thought of as an
internalized doppelgänger. The duality of self that in the gothic represents the alter
ego or antithesis of the character; the hero/villain has within him his evil twin.
Thus in Stevenson’s Jekyll and Hyde we have Jekyll, in an misguided attempt to
eradicate the evil in man’s soul, splitting himself and creating Hyde; an act which
ultimately ends in the destruction of both.
Yet this is that which fascinates the reader and lends him to sympathise and
identify with the hero/villain. The hero/villain is never intrinsically wicked, he is
promethean, he is rebellious. Constantly trying the boundaries of societal and
ethical constraints, the hero/villain is the archetypal overreacher, a figure unable to
accept human limitations. His conception is noble, just as Frankenstein’s creation
of the monster arose from a desire to emancipate humanity from the throes of
death.
The danger of the hero/villain lies not merely in his evil deeds, his malevolence
or even his defiance of conventional moral and legal restraints but in his function
as a vehicle through which the reader may indulge in the same transgressions. It is
significant that Stevenson never details Hyde’s crimes. By leaving them
deliberately unspoken, Stevenson invites the reader to fantasy and imagine what
Hyde could possibly have done and by doing so, effectively become Hyde.
Ultimately however, the otherness of the hero/villain results only in alienation and
distancing. A figure whose villainy gains him nothing, doomed to a tragic death,
the hero/villain is by far more pitiable than his insipid victims.
(Yin Mei Lenden-Hitchcock, 2006)

Home
The home became a means of exploring and uncovering social transgressions in
fin-de siecle gothic literature because of its apparent domesticity, respectability,
association with family history and its role as being the most intimate shelter of
privacy. Here, Freud’s principle of the uncanny, derived from the word
unheimlich, which interestingly means un-homely, usefully explains this.
Unheimlich gains its meaning from its apparent opposite, heimlich, which means
homely but it also means something that is concealed, secret and made obscure.
Therefore, the uncanny means something that ought to have remained secret has
now come to light. As such, homes became the sites of concealed secrets that the
fin-de-siecle gothic literature attempts to uncover, since the genre is characterized
by ideas of encountering the internal decay of established societal structures.
The fin-de-siecle gothic writers’ conception of the home as a site where their
characters engaged and explored transgressions reflected the Victorians’ frustration
with a rigid social code demarcating boundaries and markers around economic
status and gender roles. In Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr
Hyde, Jekyll moves to the innermost sanctuary of his home, the laboratory, to
concoct mixtures that will set free his repressed, violent and libidinal nature. This
part of Jekyll’s nature was distilled in the swarthy, working-class featured figure of
Hyde, who visibly transgresses accepted social conventions of Victorian middle
class life and respectability. Here, the home conceals these secret activities.
Yet, the home’s nature to “home” emphasizes its vulnerability to becoming un-
homed. When Hyde ventures out of the home at night and engages in activities that
attract the attention of Jekyll’s contemporaries, Jekyll’s secret transformation to
Hyde within his home runs the risk of being un-homed. Indeed, this risk becomes a
reality when Jekyll’s secret transformation into Hyde suddenly takes place away
from the home in Regent Park. Compellingly, the notions of being homed and un-
homed describes Jekyll and Hyde’s situation in Regent Park as Hyde becomes
unhomed, while Jekyll is homed (and trapped) in a body he does not want to be in
during the day as he moves through a public space. Jekyll describes this fear in his
final letter to Dr Utterson:
“A moment before I had been safe of all man’s respect, wealthy, beloved – the
cloth laying for me in the dining room at home; and now I was the common quarry
of mankind, hunted, houseless, a known murderer, thrall to the gallows” (Dr
Jekyll, 72).
Here, Jekyll reverses his desires to transgress social boundaries, emphasizing
Victorian middle class anxieties of being associated with and overwhelmed by the
working class that were taking up a large part of rapidly urbanized cities in the
nineteenth century. As such, Jekyll’s anxious desire for his home with all its
trappings of comfort, love and respectability emphasizes another conception of
home by the fin-de-siecle gothic writer, where secret social transgressions within
the home will potentially lead to the destruction or loss of the home.
(Niluksi Koswanage, 2006)

The Host
The trope of the Host, latent in fin-de-siecle Gothic narratives, presents the
characteristic of multiplicity, as personified by the vampiric figure who fleets from
victim to victim as different hosts sites of prey, while itself acting as a vessel for
the victims’ intermingling blood. Dracula’s imported boxes of earth are testament
to this multiplicity, signaling also the temporality of a host as a resting place. The
‘Host’ trope thus far alludes to a turn-of-century London as a Capitalist society
fuelled by the practical profit motive, whilst operating as a hub for business
dealings.
The ‘Host’ trope is ineluctably linked to its other, the Foreign Body, and we find
the gothic narrative the metaphorical Host site for playing out its underlying
tensions. The elusive yet definite presence of the foreign body is epitomized by
Dracula who as an unidentified shadowy figure is the implicit orchestrator of
events in London. It alludes again to an apprehension towards the phenomenon of
Capitalism and of its invisible hand in restructuring Victorian society. The unease
towards the dormant existence of foreign bodies within the Host is represented by
the irreconciliable personalities of Dr Jekyll, which is in Freudian terms, the
suppression of the Super-ego by the Ego. Such a psychoanalytical aspect of the
‘Host’ trope also borrows the language of the colonizer, underlying a sense of
territoriality and the desire to demarcate and maintain boundaries. Dracula’s view
of being a stranger in a strange land too is influenced by a Hegelian wisdom; he
states, “I’ve been so long master that I would be master still or at least that none
other should be master of me.”
The contamination of the Host as the main body bears also religious
undertones—as perversions of holy communion, the consumed wafer that
symbolises the body of Christ is also known as the Eucharistic Host, which
becomes warped in a parallel to Dracula who declares that Mina will become
“flesh of my flesh.” Overall, there is an anxiety of displacement and a need for a
sense of belonging that which iconic gothic characters like Frankenstein and
Dracula, whose existence in a liminal space within their unwilling host societies
represent.
(Yap Tshun-Min, 2006)
The Ineffable
The ineffable refers to that which is incapable of being expressed; indescribable or
unutterable. A second sense of the word connotes that which should not be uttered
– the taboo or the sacred.
The ineffable in gothic literature, however, may conflate the taboo and the
sacred, both sublime in their own rights. While the great name of God can be
ineffable, the terrible dread of a devil-like creature like Dracula is just as ineffable;
he is at times referred to as “He” although such capitalisation is usually reserved
for God. This conflation could reflect how uncertainty towards religion has
resulted in superstition and its equally-ineffable origins.
More commonly, the ineffable in gothic texts foregrounds the secrecy and
withholding of information common in Victorian England; the resultant hypocrisy
veils what must be kept unspoken. Besides secrets, the unconscious mind also
remains hidden. Its inaccessibility and the analyst’s desire to access it – eg. through
hypnosis in Dracula – is a common trope. The detective novel can also be seen as a
quest to uncover and express the ineffable, but many overdetermined symbols
present problems of definition to detectives and readers. The ineffable can thus be
seen as a response that either resists definition, or refuses to try defining anymore.
Frankenstein’s monster’s language-learning process draws attention to the
failure of words to articulate adequately. This inadequacy comes about in an age of
changing literary taste fuelled partly by the efficiency that the 19th century’s
financial and industrial revolutions demanded. To gothic writers, the ineffable may
well be a better alternative to the inadequacy of words.
(Lionel Lye, 2006)

Gothic Intertextuality
Gothic intertextuality can be seen as a vampiric form of drawing elements from
other texts, of sucking key ideas and characteristics into its own narrative body to
nourish and enrich itself. Intertextuality exists everywhere in all literary genres, but
Gothic intertextuality stands apart from the usual usage as it both subverts and
perverts the original meanings and intentions of the original text, in a bid to
overturn, question and invert its significance. Examples of this can be seen in both
Frankenstein and Jekyll and Hyde, where Biblical references are made for the sole
purpose of challenging and undermining its religious import, thus constituting a
form of blasphemous truncation. In the latter novel, Ephesians 2:14 is used to refer
to how Jekyll has used science to split himself into two beings, thus deviating from
and upending the original Biblical meaning. The multiplicity of jarring intertextual
sources used in Gothic texts also works to create deliberate dissonance and deep
destabalisation within its narratives, being in line with how the Gothic as a genre
seeks to critically interrogate, topple and displace existing social norms and beliefs,
of revealing the darker nature of the self and society that lies hidden within. A key
example would be the use of Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” in
Frankenstein, where the Romantic journey motif is subverted by how there is no
proper end or closure to Walton and Victor’s physical and scientific journeys
undertaken, thus refuting the possible positive ending to Coleridge’s poem.
(Magdalene Poh, 2006)

Landscape
Landscape plays an important function in gothic literature, although its
significance varies according to the socio-historical context in which a particular
gothic text is found, and obviously according to the narrative structure of the
individual text as well. In early gothic texts such as in the novels of Ann Radcliffe,
protagonists (often young, sheltered and naïve girls) undertook journeys to a far-
off, exoticised land which was portrayed as a realm of danger, excess, and the
breakdown of the controls and restrictions of the domestic and “civilized”
space. Thus these exotic lands – often the stereotypical Catholic and
Mediterranean spaces of Italy and Spain, whose inhabitants were portrayed as
volatile, treacherous and governed by uncontrolled passions – became not only
socio-political antitheses to the “safe” space of England (although even this was
ultimately unsettled by the characteristic gothic doubling), but also a symbol for
the inner landscape of restriction, exposure to the other, temptation, the finding of
a new balance, and return.
In terms of more specifically psychological processes, the gothic journey and the
projection of internal significance onto an external landscape might be read as
various forms of representation and resolution (“projection” and “introjection,” the
ebb and flow of life processes such as aging and the life cycle or desire, sexuality,
tensions between two opposing selves). For examples of such readings of gothic
literature, see Maud Bodkin’s reading of “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” in
Archetypal Patterns in Poetry: Psychological Studies of Imagination; or Anne
Williams’ essays on various gothic texts in Art of Darkness: A Poetics of
Gothic. In this mode of signification, landscape elements such as the sea, the
sublime mountains, various forms of waste land, the dual-entry house, and so on,
assume heavily-overdetermined meanings tied to the complexities of deep
psychological processes.
Exoticised landscapes are thus always closely related to the trope of the gothic
other – those Moors, Italians, Indians, Russians, Africans, Jews, East Europeans,
and other strange types who crop up throughout gothic literature, and whose
function is at least in part to embody the social and political anxieties of England’s
encounters with its colonies and competitors. While colonial gothic narratives are
most obviously concerned with the anxious placement of England vis-à-vis its
colonial spaces, all gothic literature in varying ways reflects the anxiety of place in
an age of growing global contact and interaction.

(Robbie Goh, 2004)

LETTERS
Letters to a phantom sister, wills, transcript, journal entries, newspaper entries;
Gothic narratives are punctuated with embedded writings in the form of letters and
entries that are both a pastiche and fragmented, the sum total of which makes up
the complete text. Letters while seemingly presenting objectivity on one level
through the assumed tone of factuality, are also simultaneously open and subject to
interpretation. It is linked to a reading of words as well as a misreading. There are
letters that are not replied in Frankenstein, letters that may not have reached their
destination, letters of secrecy in Jekyll and Hyde, letters that chronicle events—
these letters attempt to present to us an understanding of what happened, reiterated
with the supposed advantage of retrospect and an over-arching perspective that is
allowed by the passing of time. However, as the paths of these letters are always
dubious, it calls to attention its own in-authenticity and hence the potential for a
misreading since we are never always sure if what we are reading is accurately
represented. In other words, what has happened is always fragmented and there can
be no complete reading of events.

These fragments also call to attention the reliability of information in an age where
information is becoming increasingly available, as seen from the inclusion of
newspaper reports in Dracula and the fact that distance is no longer a barrier to
words. Some letters and entries, instead of being handwritten, are now type-written
which displaces the personal touch of the writer from the reader and handwriting
can no longer be a measure of authenticity. Anything, including words, can be
reproduced. This links the idea of letters to modern communication and
technology. The use of problematic embedded narratives illustrates an anxiety
about the increasing ease of communication and whether more information really
means knowing more. Narratives within narratives draw to attention its own
artificiality and the question of whether there can be an original sequence of events
behind what is narrated. At the same time, letters are also clearly letters of the
alphabet which cues the reader in to the notion that all that is being read is a
construct of “letters”. Perhaps over-determined, but letters open the doors to the
multitude of readings and misreadings in the Gothic world.
(Felicia Chan, 2006)

Madness
The motif of madness runs through many Gothic novels, and is
often articulated by the characters themselves. Characters question
their own sanity, or the sanity of other characters. Madness is also
often portrayed as a hereditary disease, insidiously affecting a
character’s psychological and mental health without him/her
realizing it. Oftentimes, the strain of madness in a character in
such novels is not obvious, nor overtly stated. The authors merely
present the characters’ actions, often of uncontrollable passions,
and extreme irrationality, in order to illustrate the mental ills of a
character. This also means that madness is often not easily
detectable, and it is this characteristic that allows Gothic plots to
develop since such texts focus on finding out what and why a
seeming inexplicable event occurred.
Madness in the Gothic novel is not merely an oft occurring aspect
of the genre, but also has larger social implications, especially when
placed within the context of Victorian England. Forces and
situations that rational society fears engender an anxiety of the
insane and mentally ill. Precisely because madness is often not
recognized easily, fear of the unknown, as well as fear of having the
insane living amongst themselves in society, was a major factor in
influencing the productions of works with such a theme.
This theme enhances the ominous mood of the novels, and
creates a sense of uncertainty as madness also implies lack of logic
and reason, and hence a lack of predictable behaviour. An fear-
inspiring atmosphere is also evoked, with the spectre of the insane
painted as a terrible vision, such as Bertha Mason in Charlotte
Bronte’s Jane Eyre. Other examples of novels in which madness is
an aspect of the plot are Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Emily
Bronte’s Wuthering Heights, Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s
Secret, and Wilkie Collins’ The Woman in White.
(Belinda He, 2004)

Madness
Madness remains as one of the most recognisable concepts in
Gothic literature. The most common association with “madness” is
with that of a mental condition where one is deemed to be
“irrational”. Most pervasively, “madness” is conceived as a form of
illness or disease, a condition not to be found in one of a sound
constitution. However, what Gothic literature seeks to do is to break
down the notion of “madness” as a clinical condition afflicting only
a select few; it instead suggests the importance of regarding
“madness” as that which is present but repressed in us, and our
own concurrent fear of its expression in our personality. As such,
“madness” is not in polarity with “sanity”; “madness” and “sanity”
are both present in our psyche. The self can thus be better
understood in its entirety when “madness” and “sanity” are held in
a dialectical relationship with each other.
What then results in an inherent fear of “madness” is the anxiety
that a realm of “irrationality” can possibly exist within oneself. The
nearness of “madness” is thus the paranoia shown in Gothic
literature; paranoia is not of “madness” itself. This anxiety leads to
a displacement of the qualities of “madness” onto another body (a
designated Other), outside of oneself. As such, the use of “mirror-
images” of a character who is “sane” and another who is “mad” is a
device of Gothic literature in subversion of the common notion of
“madness” as something of the few and obscure, to reconstruct it as
an essential part of normalcy.
(Michelle Liu, 2006)

MADNESS
Madness, in the form of defined psychological illness, substance-
induced states, and self-asserted madness, is consistently found in
the Gothic. The pervasiveness of this trope both reflects the shape
of the Gothic text—as disorderly and excessive—and suggests the
expression, through madness, of an ineffable quality that lacked
semantic form, being prior to Freud. The fear of madness is also the
fear of a specifically masculine loss of control, the product of
various insecurities about manhood in an era where women were
gaining economic independence. Joined with the atmosphere of
restraint, control was mandatory. Madness was its polar opposite
and therefore proved terrifying, so had to be safely sublimated via
the edifice of literature.
References to madness in literature arose in the context of a
society that was fascinated with and repelled by clinical madness,
and which increasingly institutionalized insanity, building asylums
like the one featured in Stoker’s Dracula. The attempt to contain
madness, however, has the reverse effect of blurring the boundary
separating the sane from the insane: Renfield, literally presented as
mad, attempts to save Mina from Dracula’s entrance in a
performance more than worthy of a Victorian gentleman, bringing
into question the purported sanity of everyone else. In contrast,
Jonathan Harker and Frankenstein’s titular character are
implicated in the institution of madness but never appear to be
perceived as such by their companions. The condition of madness is
arbitrary and slippery, and remains as dangerous subtextual
disturbance beneath overt norms of rationality and progress.
[Alina Ng, 2006]

Mad Scientist
A figure that appears in Gothic fiction after the Romantic period, reflecting both
Victorian society's fascination with science and their fear that scientific knowledge
will eventually lead to the destruction of society and morality.
The mad scientist’s “irrationality” or “madness” derives from his inability to
conform to societal order and institutionalised law. Unlike the Romantic rebel, the
figure of the mad scientist is a figure of horror because it cannot be contained by
the status quo. The mad scientist figure indulges in antisocial behaviour, staying
isolated and working apart from the rest of society. He is inconsistent with the
principles of reason, inventing a field of study that goes again known scientific
theories and is impossible rationally. Examples of such fields and inventions
include Victor Frankenstein's Galvanism, Jekyll's Chemical Transformation, and
Stapleton's Fluorescent Phosphorus Compound.
The mad scientist replaces “the figure of the scientist as hero”, which the critic
Postlewait notes was one of the most popular ideas in the nineteenth century.
Especially towards the end of the nineteenth century, the British found it
increasingly difficult to think that they were inevitably progressive. The mad
scientist’s forays into science started revealing bodily and moral degeneration,
reflecting Victorian fears that civilisation was declining instead of progressing.
The mad scientist works towards fulfilling his desires which are uncontrolled by
the “Law of the Father”. In Gothic fiction, the mad scientist is intimately related to
two figures through doubling tropes: the Monster and the Rational Scientist. The
Monster is the Mad Scientist’s creation, but also provides a dialectical relationship
that suggests both monster and creator (who is desirous and willing to transgress)
are Freudian projections of desires that transgress the boundaries of the status quo
sexually, morally, legally and so on. The rational scientist is usually the hero to the
mad scientist’s villainy, the positive anti-thesis who saves society from the
Monster created by the mad scientist. However, the doubling also highlights
similarities between the Rational and Mad scientists, even as they purportedly
show differences. For example, Conan Doyle’s Stapleton uses the same logic and
strategic cunning that is characteristic of Sherlock Holmes to outwit Holmes in
London. The doubling functions to show that both the Mad and Rational Scientists
are not two separate entities, but two sides of the same coin. The mad scientist
demonstrates the self within that is feared because it is creative, yet libidinous and
difficult to control
(Ann Koh, 2006)

Misogyny
Male misogyny is a prominent theme in gothic literature, varying in its treatment
of the Victorian woman from barely acknowledging her presence to demonising
her. This attitude arises from a number of socio-cultural developments in the
Victorian era, such as the growing prominence of women beyond the domestic
circle and growing masculine insecurity. The fact that such attitudes are reflected
as early as Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein, and by a female author no less, show that
misogyny in Gothic texts are not simply male adolescent fantasies but reflections
of underlying currents of thought and fears of the period.
Fear of female sexuality is a key part of misogyny in Gothic texts, wherein it
becomes a force that threatens to overwhelm the masculine self in texts like
Dracula or Ollalla. It is the fear of the vagina detenta, in which the female sexuality
is alluring to the male, yet also involves a symbolic castration of male virility.
Often, in such texts, physical violence, shrouded in phallic terms such as the stake
used on Lucy in Dracula or the tearing apart of Elizabeth in Frankenstein, is used
to symbolically exorcise the threat to the masculine self and allow the male to
continue partaking in purely masculine activities. Such violence and activities not
only restore the male self-belief in his masculinity, but also serve as a containment
of the female by isolating her away from the realm of the male, thereby removing
the “threat” of her presence to male superiority. The concept of the hunt or
adventure, for instance, as a purely masculine enterprise in a great number of
gothic texts reveal deep-seated fears of women entering and surpassing men in
what were previously solely male activities, such as business.
(Tang Chee Mun, 2004)

The Missing Mother

The typical gothic mother is absent or dead. If the mother is alive and well, such
as Lucy’s mother in Bram Stoker’s Dracula, she is associated with the incapacity
to carry out her maternal duties. The typical gothic mother has to be killed in order
for the domestic instability that underpins the gothic text to flourish. Only the
occasional evil or deviant mother (Olalla’s mother in Robert Louis Stevenson’s
“Olalla” for example), is allowed to survive in the gothic text. Even then, the evil
and deviant mother figure (such as H.R Haggard’s titular character in She) has to
be removed eventually for there to be some sort of closure to the gothic text.
The repression of the mother allows the progression of the narrative in the gothic
mode. The missing mother also serves as a social commentary where her absence
and silence highlight the repression of women within an overwhelming patriarchal
regime.
The missing mother points to the absence of regulation and the absence of stability
in the family, hence the desire for the male characters to usurp the maternal role
and circumvent the female’s role in procreation (Victor Frankenstein and Dr Jekyll
do that in their respective fictional worlds). At the same time, the missing mother
is a signifier for the stranglehold of men over the legal and physical self-agency of
the women in gothic texts.
(Choo Li Lin, 2006)

Monster:
An archetypal figure that acts as a central symbol and character,
tying together individuals, themes, and world of the Gothic
novel. Many features of the Gothic, (pathos, terror, sublime,
supernatural, landscape) are embodied figuratively and literally
within this character. There is a shifting of taboo onto this safer
symbol which allows a remaining implicit connection to original
taboo meanings. Often it becomes an over-determined symbolic
figure with many meaning or associations that are potentially
contradictory.
The monster destabilizes assumptions about societal structures
and institutions, knowledge, self, secret vices. Stevenson’s Jekyll
and Hyde (1886) is fuelled with fears surrounding rising urban
populations, human regression and the instabilities of identity.
Embodying the monster and the civilized into one totally removes
the concept of a separate other. Tension then arises between the
image of the degenerate and unseen essence of degeneration. The
horror of the monster coming from within is reflected through this
transgressive figure of Hyde, who is in fact inseparable from Jeykll.
A monster created inverts notions of natural creation and a
traditional religious belief system. Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein
(1817), depicts a monster that serves as a metonymy of social
ugliness that created him. On an individual level, he also mirrors
his creator Frankenstein, suggesting a sometimes unstable split
between the two. As the dark other, the monster interrogates and
defines by opposition within the context of the novel’s world and
also as a larger symbol to societal concerns. A close relationship
between narrative form and social ideology expands the idea of
implicit challenge to the main character’s notions of
superiority. The “other” is a subversion of Victorian high culture
and hidden monstrosities in society itself are displayed, revealed,
suggested through this figure.

(Kimberley Yap, 2004)

Monster
Commonly regarded as an overdetermined symbol in gothic
literature, the idea of the monster can be regarded in a different
light when considering its etymological roots. The Oxford English
Dictionary informs us that the word “monster” originates from the
classical Latin word “monstrum”, meaning “portent, prodigy,
monstrous creature, wicked person, monstrous act, or atrocity”,
and this is taken from the base of the word “monstre”, meaning “to
warn”. Likewise, the monster in novels such as Mary Shelley’s
Frankenstein is more than just a fearful figure, but also one that
stands as a symbolic mirror held up to society in order to critique it.
Because the monster is, more often than not, a creation of the very
society in which it inhabits, the actual form of the creature could be
said to be the crystallization of the very fears of that society. Just as
Frankenstein’s monster is cobbled together from various body
parts, so too is a monster characteristic of a city and its fears,
where the monster can stand for and represent anything from the
fear of the father to the fear of losing one’s property. Since one of its
root meanings is “to warn”, perhaps too, the monster in gothic
literature serves as a warning to its society to be aware of the very
ills that have begotten it, by showing that it is not only the very
thing in which the society’s fears are displaced into, but also the
very embodiment of it.

[Jaclyn Wong, 2006]

Monster:
The monster within the gothic genre is usually depicted as the “other” of the “self”
within the novel. It is usually ‘ugly’ or distorted in nature however not only in the
physicality of the creature/ individual’s form but also in other aspects like
psychological or emotional. The ‘ugly’ nature or distortion of the monster is
defined by a group of people or the society that it resides in within the novel. In
other words, the nature of the monster itself goes against everything that the “self”
within the novel vouches to be, for example the “self” having established as good
hence places the monster, its nemesis or it’s “other”, as evil. This could be clearly
seen in the figures of Dr Jekyll and Mr. Hyde in which the former is placed as the
‘self’/ good whilst the latter is known as the ‘other’/evil.
The concept of the monster within the gothic genre has progressed significantly
over the years. One clear movement would be that of the progression from the
‘romantic’ monster to the ‘fin de siècle’ monster. The differences between the two
are not only found in the physicality of the creatures themselves in which the
‘romantic’ monster is bigger and more physically monstrous than the ‘fin de siècle’
monster. There is also a duly noted concept that the distancing of the “other” from
the “self” has been narrowed with such a progress. One clear example to reflect
this would be a comparison of the Frankenstein’s monster and Mr. Hyde. Whilst
the Frankenstein’s monster’s other-ness could be more easily established within its
novel, the other-ness of Mr. Hyde is more illusive because the “other” of the ‘fin
de siècle’ monster seems to have somehow merged with the “self”, hence the
boundary between these two has been blurred and crossed till the difference
between the two becomes more difficult to establish.
(Nenny Triana, 2006)

Monster
Generally, the word “monster” is used simplistically to indicate an imaginary evil
creature, horrifying both in appearance and behavior, and ultimately to be
destroyed by the forces of good.
On one level, the Gothic retains these characteristic traits: Hyde is a short and
appears physically deformed being who terrorizes Soho, while Frankenstein’s
monster is a horrifying patchwork of limbs intent on destroying his creator’s
happiness. On another level however, the Gothic frustrates any attempt to label the
two opposing parties in polarized terms of good and evil, and serves as a warning
against our tendencies to prematurely judge anything which we instinctively deem
as unsettling because of it’s nonconformity to societal norms.
Authoral ambiguity in Frankenstein for instance, forces the reader to suspend
judgment of both Frankenstein and his monster when narrative objectivity is
replaced with multiple subjective narratives. While Frankenstein condemns his
creation and warns against the monster’s sympathetic narrative, his warning
reflects Frankenstein’s own imbibed prejudice, such that even Walton is at a loss
as to whom to trust. Similarly, Dracula is more than simply a manifestation of Evil:
while the men’s hatred for him is understandable, Stoker presents us with an
alternative understanding of him as a man suffering the same curse as both Mina
and Lucy, thus revealing the possibility of both the monstrous (in this case,
vampiric) face within the self as well as the familiar self in the monstrous other.
(Fazylah Bte Abd Rahman, 2006)

MONSTROSITY
In 18th century aesthetic and moral criticism, the word ‘monster’
signified ugliness, irrationality and all things and events unnatural.
It was viewed as the antithesis of neo-classical values of harmony
and unified composition. A monster portrayed an image of deformity
and irregularity. In literary terms, it involved works that crossed the
boundaries of reason and morality, presenting excessive and
viciously improper scenes and characters.
In M. G. Lewis’s The Monk, the protagonist has been attacked in
reviews for being a monster, that is, for representing and
encouraging every type of improper, depraved and licentious
behaviour. Indeed, the numerous evil aristocrats, monks and quasi-
paternal figures – the staple villains of Gothic novels – display
characteristics of monstrosity throughout Gothic fiction of that
period.
The monster and the notion of monstrosity serve a useful critical
and moral function in the Gothic tradition as a composite term for a
collection of negative and socially unacceptable features. As overt
displays of vice, monsters presented and cautioned readers against
excessive and indulgence in improper behaviour – thus emphasizing
the values and benefits of morally upright and honourable conduct
and evoking the socially-expected reactions to examples of vice.
The monstrous disclosure of the instability of systems of moral
and aesthetic meaning produced ambivalent monsters, best evinced
in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818). Imbued with Romantic
sympathies for the outcast and rebel, the novel presents a humane
and suffering monster, less a figure of vice and transgression and
more a victim of monstrous social exclusions. Indeed, blurring the
boundaries between good and bad, human and monster, the novel
interrogates prevailing value systems to the extent that monstrosity
becomes uncannily pervasive, an effect of and intrinsic to the
sphere of the human.

(Caslin Luo, 2004)

Nature
Nature, in the Gothic, is often the symbol for that which is sublime and,
accordingly, that which is transcendental and extraordinary. The symbol is
underscored in the absence of God, faith, and religion and its institutions from the
text. Repetitive and descriptive use of Nature in the text appears to recall a more
ancient religion, pantheism, particularly in light of the stark absence of a Christian
God. In Shelley’s Frankenstein, there are many instances where the word “Nature”
can be seen as taking the place of “God”, such as when Frankenstein said “[the
learned philosopher] might dissect, anatomise, and give names… but causes in
their secondary and tertiary grades were utterly unknown to him”. In the age of
rapid scientific progress, much of Nature is still unknown to man, despite his best
attempts to master it. This, coupled with Frankenstein’s disastrous attempt at
mastering Nature, ultimately interrogates the scientific project and the futility of
having mastery over that which he cannot fully or even adequately comprehend.
There is, however, a repeated emphasis on Man’s nearness to Nature in the text
through his admiration of it; even the monster is not immune to its ineffable
beauty. There is a sense of order in the world through Man’s “oneness” with
Nature, as the instance of Frankenstein’s self-inscribed seclusion while creating the
monster suggests—his “[insensibility] to the charms of nature” coincides with his
undertaking of the project that goes against the laws of Nature and therefore
disturbs this sense of ordering.
The stark absence of God and Christian faith in the text and the various
descriptions of Nature in God-like terms highlight the way in which the Gothic
indirectly interrogates the relevance of a Christian faith in an increasingly
secularized society. In place of Christianity, it seems to suggest a throwback to an
ancient pantheistic view of the world, ironically—even as science and technology
supposedly enable society to “progress” at even more rapid rates—as a more
coherent way of ordering the world.
(Denise Li, 2006)

Occultism:
Occultism, in relation to ordinary knowledge, is as the esoteric is to
the exoteric. Etymologically, ‘occult’ means ‘concealed’ and is
unrelated to ‘cult’ which means ‘worship’ but the genre of the
Gothic makes a cult out of the occult. The esoteric societies taught
theories that differed considerably from modern science but had as
much claim on public imagination at a time when Christian
orthodoxy was being challenged and reinforced.
The Occult sciences were based on the ancient schemata of the four
qualities (hot, cold, moist, dry), the four humors (blood, choler,
phlegm, bile), the four elements (fire, air, water, earth) and the four
temperaments (choleric, sanguine, phlegmatic, melancholy).
Following a pre-Copernican perspective, traditional occult sciences
form a hierarchy reaching from the study of alchemy (concerned
with the terrestrial world) to astrology (the influences of the celestial
bodies) and cabbalism (the ‘super-celestial’ or the archetypal world).
Using natural or white magic, an occultist may divine the workings
of the universe; or may influence the course of events to personal
ends through black or malefic magic.
The novelist Charles Williams (1886-1945) was one of the many
prominent writers affiliated with esoteric societies and he presents
many ideas of the occult in his novels where the motive force
behind the stories is the human desire to find order in a chaos of
esoteric teachings. Occult ideology is shown to enter an otherwise
traditionally Christian world of the Victorian novelist in the early
20th Century.
(Nicole Kwan, 2004)

"Other"-Anxiety
The gothic anxiety about the monstrous “Other” is fore-grounded when the
apparent simplicity of the self/other relationship as a clear binary breaks down into
something more complex under close examination. The self experiences immense
fear, not only towards the failure of containment of the “other”, but also in having
identified latent similarities between itself and its evil twin.
As noted in Chapter Two, Victor Frankenstein fears most what he cannot control
-- that part of himself most closely allied to his monster. Each of his attempts to
seize control fails; each failure contributes to his fear. That which Victor fears yet
toward which he is obsessively drawn has been usefully outlined by Nietzsche as a
dichotomy between Apollo and Dionysus (binary of Apollonian/Dionysian), that
is, between rational thought and everything that escapes or exceeds rationality. As
Victor discovered, what exceeds rationality appears monstrous.
In Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, fear stems from recognition of the horror within, one
that lies latent, repressed, concealed but emerges with retaliative violence,
destruction and evil when permitted to surface. Notably, Jekyll is an apparent
respectable man who contains within him a potential for profound wickedness that
is released in the shape of Mr Hyde. His desire to “upgrade” himself, in want of
respect, honour, and distinction in Victorian society, spurs him to conceal any
irregularities in his life. It is in the unveiling of this corollary—the greater the
bourgeois aspirations towards good of Jekyll, the greater the monstrosity of
Hyde—that the self recoils in horror.
(Anne Tng, 2006)

"Othering”
The Gothic problematic of “othering” may be usefully approached by
understanding its narrative as the product of anxiety stemming from a rapidly
booming industrialist Victorian society. The Gothic text, then, is to the society
what Hyde is to Jekyll. Despite an inherent narrative “monstrosity” (I borrow Chris
Baldick’s term here), the Gothic text cannot be “othered” from the society (and
‘conventional’ narrative) it mirrors, because it is born from the troubled suspicion
of this same society’s advancement. In this same respect, Frankenstein as
“Romantic Gothic” cannot be properly regarded as “other” from the Romance
paradigm, because it really is the “bastard” of its own narrative father, in the same
way Hyde is a baser version of Jekyll’s self. Dracula, too, cannot be “other” to
human; he cannot be the antithesis of life (i.e. death) when he is “Un-Dead.”
Catherine’s famous three words in Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights perhaps
most excellently pronounce the Gothic paradox of “othering”: “I am Heathcliff.”
Self-identity can only be affirmed not through the mirroring of self in other, but
through the self being the other. Jekyll becomes his own other, when he recognises
that Hyde is “(other) than (himself)” and yet is “(himself).” In the same way that
Frankenstein’s monster is “other” to himself, it also validates him, because it is an
extension of his own powers of science. Similarly, there must be a Dracula in
every human subject, if this vampirish symbol of the id is only waiting to break
through the constraints of the ego and super-ego.
(Yeo Huan, 2006)

Paranoia / Hysteria.
Symptoms of psychiatric illnesses, but also terms to describe the
modes of narrative that are operative in Gothic literature. Eve
Sedgwick aligns the paranoid / hysteric modes with another
common characterisation of Gothic literature, that of ‘male’ Gothic
(‘horror’) in the case of the former and ‘female’ Gothic (‘terror’) for
the latter.
In this light, one paranoid Gothic text may be that of Bram’s
Stoker’s Dracula, with the male protagonists (Jonathan, van
Helsing et al) hunting down and eliminating the senex irratus of the
Dracula-figure (who disrupts coitus and threatens to take over
progenitive function) which has already been established in the text
as a foreign Other as well as a bloodsucking Satanic figure. A text
that displays Gothic hysteric narrative traits may be Arthur Conan
Doyle’s Hound of the Baskervilles: the reader together with Watson
is plunged into an environment of uncertainty and danger at
Dartsmoor, with a mythic diabolical hound roaming the moors,
haunting the imagination of Watson and his protectee. The use of
Gothic traits in this text, however, may be described as a qualified
one: human reason in the figure of Holmes finally still beats the
day, with any supernatural phenomena attributed to clever
scientific villainy.
The Freudian take on both illnesses, with both paranoia and
hysteria arising from the ego’s need to protect itself through the
mechanism of repression, may be useful here. Both modes of
narrative in their medical equivalent in being departures from
normality in mental states also depart radically from any ‘classic’
depiction of the everyday, with heightened sensibilities also serving
to destabilise what is ‘normal’ and ‘usual’ in Victorian England,
with latent meaning needing to be investigated behind the
repressive respectability of manifest meaning of everyday culture
and moral values, as in the case of domesticity and sexuality.

See: Eve Sedgwick’s The Conventions of Gothic Literature, Sigmund

Freud and Jacques Lacan’s writing on psychoanalysis.

(Tan Simin, 2004)

Purity
The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) defines purity as the quality or condition of
being pure in various aspects . In general, it signifies “faultlessness, correctness”,
and especially “freedom from matter that contaminates, defiles, corrupts, or
debases; physical cleanness”. The idea of purity is also specifically relevant to the
individual, denoting an unblemished character, innocence, and the condition of
“chastity, ceremonial cleanness” in one of the earliest uses of the word.
In gothic literature, the issue of purity is commonly a source of anxiety, having
religious, social, and even political significance. The anxiety begins very probably
as a result of a Judeo-Christian religious heritage; because God is pure and cannot
abide impurity, sinful man has to continually struggle between holy and earthly
desires. This physically unbridgeable distance between God and man is further
strained by the threat of rejection “…Touch no unclean thing, and I will receive
you.” in 2 Corinthians 6:17, The Holy Bible (New International Version).
In all other associations, one may see the great concern with purity through the
extent to which the idea of mixture, invasion and corruption play a part in gothic
narratives such as Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, R.L. Stevenson’s Dr Jekyll and Mr
Hyde, and Bram Stoker’s Dracula. For instance, each of these narratives purposes
to tell a tale or report a strange case, but the integrity of each narrative is
compromised by the epistolary form that is inevitably subjective and incomplete in
knowledge. In addition, the heterogeneity of voices—especially in Dr Jekyll and
Mr Hyde and Dracula—suggests the difficulty of sustaining a single correct
perspective. The threat of impurity is consequently played out in the struggle
between human and monstrous protagonists, the overarching human anxiety being
aptly voice by Frankenstein when he expressed the fear that “a race of devils
would be propagated upon the earth who might make the very existence of the
species of man a condition precarious and full of terror” (160). In short, purity
means such a lot in gothic literature because the alternative is an uncontainable,
and therefore unsafe, sublimity.
References
Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein. England: Penguin Group, 1994.
Stevenson, R.L. Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. Great Britain: Wordsworth Edition
Limited, 1999.
Stoker, Bram. Dracula. London: Penguin Group, 2003.
(Tan Su Linn, 2004)

Queer Gothic
In 1895, Oscar Wilde was convicted of homosexuality because of his gothic novel,
The Picture of Dorian Gray. He pleaded that homosexuality was “the love that
dares not speak its name”. Following Wilde’s suggestion, queer critics often read
the unspeakable, secrets and gaps in gothic narratives as -- to use Foucault’s terms
-- repressive apparatuses of sexuality. It is, therefore, not coincidental that the first
gothic novel, The Castle of Otranto (1765), was written by a gay man, Horace
Walpole. The mid-eighteenth century saw the legislation of anti-homosexuality
laws and homosexuality was increasingly policed. The policing was, in turn,
introjected into the gothic writers’ imagination, and even though the writers could
not speak of their sexuality explicitly, they reshaped their primal material and
forbidden desires into gothic narratives where sometimes the gaps in the narratives
call forth the uncanny, which allows a queer reading such as Elaine Showalter’s
“Dr. Jekyll’s Closet”.
Following Foucault’s argument that homosexuals became a species, monsters,
as the gothic other, may represent the homosexual; they threaten the
heteronormative society and have to be expunged. For example, in Richard Dyer’s
“Children of the Night”, he likens the discovery of Dracula as a vampire and his
death to the discovery of the homosexual and the expurgation of homosexuality.
However, it is not necessary to read all monsters and/or androgynous characters
as homosexuals. What gothic narratives are most concerned with are the anxiety of
gender relations with the rise of the “New Woman” and the negotiations of
masculinity in an age of capitalism and colonialism.
(Aaron Ho, 2006)
Rationality
During the late 18th century to the late 19th century, breakthroughs in the fields of
chemistry and electricity strongly suggested the world was determined by natural,
irrefutable laws and equations. This flourishing of the sciences arose from the age
of Enlightenment which posited that rationality and reason lead to progress.
However the Gothic movement departed from the rationality of the Enlightenment
in its rejection of reason and decorum. Instead, the Gothic questioned, and was a
reaction, to this discourse of unproblematic progress through rationality. It
explored the effects on society which developed from this economic-rational
discourse, such as the dawning of the Industrial Age. This is seen in Frankenstein,
Dr. Jekyll and Mr Hyde, and Dracula. In these texts, the application of science and
rationality not only produces monstrosities that turn on society but fail as well to
explain the supernatural and the metaphysical. Rationality breaks down when
society is shown to be beyond predetermination by mere equations. The Gothic
explores the unreasonable and chaotic universe, rife with twisted desires where
“progress” and the veneer of reason and rationality only conceal repressed desires
paradoxically brought about by such values. It shows how the power of science
can indeed transform life but not always positively and without cost. Rationality is
also subverted through the narrative form of the Gothic. In place of realism and
objectivity are the use of questionable narrators and unstable, subjective epistolary
forms. Against the uncanny and the dominance of the Id, rationality breaks down
and rationality’s dark contrary, madness, takes thematic precedence in the Gothic
novel.
(Winston Cheong, 2006)

Religion
Christianity is both very much present and absent in Gothic literature. In Dracula,
religion features prominently in the fight against the vampire – Van Helsing,
Harker and Mina frequently invoke the name of God for supernatural and divine
aid against the power of Dracula. Yet, there is also a disturbing sense that God is
strangely absent, or at best, distant, within the novel. God’s power seems limited –
captured and contained within material shapes and symbols such as the Host,
Indulgences, and the Crucifix. The men who hunt down Dracula are dependent on
the trappings of religion without true substance. Christianity thus becomes reduced
to transferable property.
God is also sidelined in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. On one hand, while
Biblical allusions to God as Creator abound in the novel, it is always in
juxtaposition to the transgression of Victor Frankenstein as the mad scientist.
Again, God is invoked only when an immediate threat is identified, as Victor
laments and appeals to God to grant him the strength to defeat and destroy his
monster. Christianity as the dominant religion in nineteenth century England was
thoroughly interrogated and questioned, its beliefs in an Almighty God challenged
as science and technology assumed prominence. Gothic authors, themselves
questioning the relevance of religion, foregrounded these issues by presenting
Christianity in a dubious light – present, but altogether powerless, shallow and
somewhat deficient.
(Fong Minghui, 2006)

The romance paradigm

The gothic narrative very often is a mirror and subversion of the romance
paradigm. The romance framework, given definition by Northrop Frye, involves a
(relatively) young hero undergoing a transformative experience in overcoming the
obstacles that stand in his way of attaining the heroine of his dreams, the jeune fille
(Fr. ‘young girl’). The main obstacle usually takes the form of a senex iratus (Lat.
‘angry old man’), often her father, who thwarts the fruition of his desires of a
marital union with her. The hero is then sent into exile but he subsequently returns
home to wed the jeune fille. The gothic, however, while borrowing from the
romance, is its perverse doppelganger. The gothic typically ends not in marriage,
but in the interruption of coitus (Lat. ‘sexual intercourse’), where the hero does not
attain his desired union with the heroine. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) and
Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) are two useful examples to illustrate this. The
blissful unions of Victor Frankenstein and Arthur Godalming with their wives are
thwarted by angry ‘father’ figures – the former’s consummation of marriage with
Elizabeth is frustrated by the monster while the latter loses Lucy to Count
Dracula. Another way this subversion is played out is evident in the homosocial
world of Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr.
Hyde. The marked absence of any possibility of a blissful union with a jeune fille
negates the heterosexual love and courtship of the romance.
(Jacqueline Chia, 2006)

Secrets
Secrets, namely that which is ‘unspeakable’ is a distinctive gothic trope. In literary
novels, secrets are knowledge deliberately concealed from the readers and/or from
the characters involved. In gothic literature, secrets aid in creating a sense of
suspense, hinging on a scandal or mystery and subsequently lead to a shocking
revelation at the end. Often, a foreboding shadow is cast upon those who withhold
secrets, be it a dark family history or a Faustian pact as exemplified by Shelley’s
Frankenstein and Stevenson’s Dr Jekyll who are both possessors of an
‘unspeakable’ knowledge which allows them to transcend the limits and abilities of
man but eventually at the expense of their sanity, friends and lives.
The secrecy of identity and sexuality is also prevalent in Gothic literature where
the ambiguity and anonymity of informers and correspondents add to the
overarching mystery. There are also suggestions that the seemingly upright life led
by Victorian men in the day is coupled with a lurid ‘secret’ life at night where at
times even their heterosexual preferences are called into question. Although not
overtly articulated, novels such as Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde reveal a generally
homosocial society whereby the fast bonding of the men hints at something more
than platonic friendship.
Secrets as a form of concealment also connote darkness and acts as a means of
subversion against the façade of the hypocritical Victorian society which boasts a
well-policed state with brightly-lit streets at night, claiming the honourability of
well-clothed individuals and the safety of the private self, all which the gothic
trope seeks to challenge.
(Kong Yuqi, 2006)

Sleep

Sleep is depicted in the gothic text to be a process or an activity that forms a locus
for perverted horrors to take shape and thrive in the most subtle and monstrous of
ways. Instead of being rendered as a harmless pursuit that reinvigorates the body,
soul and mind or a natural event that follows the exertions of the day, it manifests
itself in all its liminality as a state of being that exposes the vulnerability of the
individual to supernatural forces and macabre influences beyond the his/her
consciousness or control. This subversive concept of sleep is played out both in
Dracula and Jekyll & Hyde. Lucy Westenra writes in her journal, “Oh the terrible
struggle that I have had against sleep…with such unknown horrors as it has for
me!”(143). Henry Jekyll recounts, in his narrative, how he went to bed as the
doctor but had awakened as the villainous Hyde (67). Sleep not only becomes the
medium for animating mysterious and arcane metamorphoses but in a larger
context symbolizes, through its unnatural affiliations with the Undead and the
fantastic, how the general malaise, repression and unarticulated anxieties and fears
of a society at a critical stage of transition can only be expressed via the disruptions
and distortions of a natural procedure. Sleep, in the gothic, can only be restored to
its original, positive, non-threatening condition paradoxically through death even
though in its previous malevolent state it is inextricably tied to death.
(Sherene Lobo, 2006)

Sin
One of the more subtle monstrosities produced by the Gothic interrogation of the
wealth and science obsessed Victorian era is the new forms Sin which indicate a
pervasive estrangement of Victorian society and its values with God.
The Victorians, with their new found optimisms in the Enlightenment and
science created in its shadow countless possibilities in which tenets of religious
beliefs have been forgotten and betrayed. Sin as explored in the Gothic is this very
shadow.When Frankenstein creates his monster, he manages to use the scientific
advances of his age to displace the creation role of God. Hence, Science as a
possible road to hell is exposed and explored in the Gothic. But religion as cast
aside also manifests itself in gestures like Harker’s skepticism of the gift of the
Crucifix which later brings him comfort. These sentiments are also most obvious
when Dr. Jekyll tries to rid himself from Sin; he no longer turns to religion but to
science and produces a monster who is the embodiment of his sin. As for
redemption, the church as an institution is usually absent, a mark of Victorian
skepticism, and characters like Mina Harker have to rely on their own faith and
belief for redemption. More often, the new forms of Gothic sin that arise out of
Victorian obsessions for knowledge and wealth leave their pursuers in a self
created hell on earth, tormented by their monsters. The monsters of Sin no longer
come from hell but from the hands of man.
(Stephanie Chu, 2006)

Gothic Sublime
The concept of the sublime arguably carries varying associations and connotations
across different socio-cultural and historical periods. However, the sublime can
generally be defined as that which surpasses one’s being, senses or understanding,
or an experience that is and confers upon one elements of the extraordinary. The
use or depiction of the sublime, with its socio-cultural specific associations and
connotations, as subject matter, landscape, or the personification of the sublime
through characters in gothic texts, can be self-reflexive and serves to interrogate
and subvert the very act of describing, representing or defining the sublime in
gothic narratives. This interrogation at the narrative level also implicates and is
facilitated at the thematic level through themes and gothic tropes like doubling,
containment, madness and the figure of the monster etc. For instance, the monster
in Frankenstein and the Count in Dracula, are not only associated with the
sublime landscapes but are also the ‘monstrous’ embodiment of the sublime, often
associated with elements of the unknown and are thus threatening and elusive. The
attempt at and difficulty in capturing these elusive characters by the other
characters in the plots provide an instance whereby the critique on the ironic
attempt at representing and ‘capturing’ the sublime (also the transcendental) in
gothic texts is facilitated.
The sublime is also prefigured in the urban settings of certain gothic texts
through elements of extreme lack or absence, like silence, darkness and barrenness
etc, embodied in the characters largely at the psychological level, and further
reflective of gothic themes and tropes like indeterminacies, liminal space, madness
and identities. For instance, the indeterminable “deformity” and bestial brutality of
Hyde in The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and the seemingly ‘rational’
‘madness’ of Renfield in Dracula, which questions the boundaries of sanity and
insanity and the assumed goodness of rationality. The gothic sublime is thus also
used to highlight or question larger implications or issues such as representation,
subjectivity, naming, categories, identities and power, and provides platforms for
analysis or critique also at the psychological level. The gothic sublime evidently
serves as a tool to critique and reflect the issues and anxieties of the society in
gothic narratives.
(Lee Soo Pin, Pauline, 2004)

Gothic Sublime
Sublimity is a vital, integral part of the Gothic novel that embraces a variety of
historical practices and can be analyzed in political, religious, ethical and natural
contexts. There is no one single essence of the sublime, as it slips away from the
signification of language easily. Edmund Burke famously pinned an idea of the
sublime down to a device of terror that awakens the faculties through suspense or
dread. However, Gothic sublimity is not merely instrumental as a repertoire of
terrifying devices. It holds symbolic resonance as external suspense is subordinated
to the excesses of the imagination and emotion.
Inherent in the Gothic Sublime, is the complex nature of pain and fear unfolding
alongside the psychological and cultural dimensions of terror. It is Freud’s essay of
“The Uncanny” that resonates with this notion of the Gothic Sublime. The uncanny
derives its terror from something strangely familiar which defeats our efforts to
separate ourselves from it. This fear or terror, that the Gothic Sublime unleashes, is
powerful as it is not only interiorized within the self but unutterable as well. Words
and images grow radically unstable and meaning is continually questioned with
great psychological unease. The terror can be located at the very origin of desire,
where incest, homosexuality and rampant sexuality lay in waiting to emerge. The
Gothic Sublime hence releases into fiction, desires deeply hidden, long suppressed
and then forced into silence, greatly intensifying the dangers of an uncontrollable
release from restraint.
(Maureen Hoon, 2006)

Transference
Transference, originally a term coined by Freud to represent the relationship
between the analysand (patient) and the analyst, refers to the projecting and
redirecting of one’s unconscious self, feelings and desires (especially those
unconsciously retained from childhood which deals with core issues of identity
problems rather than with past traumatic incidents) onto another being or object.
The process of transference is a catharsis, and where one’s unconscious desires and
feelings are repressed, they can obtain release through the action of repetition,
which, in a psychoanalytic treatment, these repeated actions and thoughts (which
are unconscious) will then be transferred onto the analyst.
In a literary text, transference may take 2 forms – 1) the author as the ‘analysand’
projecting his unconscious desires and feelings unto his/her characters on to the
‘analyst’ (who is the reader); and, 2) the characters in the novel to other figures or
objects in the novel.
In a gothic novel, transference manifests itself as the characters in the novel project
the unconscious fears (desires, anxieties) onto another being, consciously making
these fears or desires something almost alien from themselves – something they
would call the “Other”, yet not realising that this “Other” is actually inherent in
themselves.
For example, in Frankenstein, Victor’s feelings of hatred (or his unresolved
conflicts with his father), is transferred onto the figure of the monster, who then
outwardly expresses the hatred of father-figures in the novel. The monster is thus a
projection of Victor’s inner self.
However, the implication of transference is the indestructibility of the unconscious
and its fantasies, and hence total transference of one’s unconscious desires can
never occur. Hence, Victor and the monster become doubles of each other.

(Michelle J.Y. Tiong, 2004)

Gothic transgression
Transgression is central to the Gothic because it serves as a means for writers to
interrogate existing categories, limits and anxieties within nineteenth century
English society. By transgressing social limits the Gothic “reinforces the values
and necessity of restoring or defining limits” through the presentment of the
horrific outcomes of transgression (Botting, 7). Most often, these transgressions
reflect and refract current anxieties of the age as a way to deal and contain them.
Anxieties regarding the dissolution of gender differences, due to the emergence of
the New Woman and the aesthete; regarding the possibility of devolution and
degeneration in man; and regarding fears of the working class - a repercussion of
the French Revolution- are dealt with singly or in overlapping ways. Consider how
in Dracula sexual differences are “ef(face)ed” by the trope of the vampiric mouth
which is both “penetrator” and “orifice” (Craft, 95); which is further complicated
by the essentially male act of penetration to the neck by male and female vampires
alike. The New woman (who is gender ambiguous in being biologically female, yet
desiring masculinity) seems to be parodied horrifically here. The New Woman is
further parodied in the vampiric Lucy whose maternal instincts are reversed (with
her feeding on children, instead), promiscuous (with multiple husband’s whose
bloods are coursing through her) and blatant sexuality (in seducing Arthur). The
threatening figure of the New Woman as Lucy, and the sexual ambiguity
represented by all the vampires, are subdued and destroyed, vicariously for the
reader. However such overt aims are problematised by the numerous Gothic works
that lack reassuring closures, presenting their own narrators as unreliable and
questionable, and revealing the covert monstrosity in mainstream society and the
aristocrats (- that leaves the reader more insecure than not. The Gothic writers
themselves seem to be unlikely proponents to restore societal limits and boundaries
– since they, very often, were transgressors of those very boundaries (e.g. Shelley,
Wilde, etc.). Thus, although Gothic transgression did interrogate current issues, its
aims and intended effects were ambivalent.
Botting, Fred. Gothic. London and New York: Routledge (1996)
Craft, Christopher. ‘Kiss Me with Those Red Lips’: Gender and Inversion in Bram
Stoker's Dracula. Dracula : Bram Stoker ed. Glennis Byron. Basingstoke, Hants.:
Macmillan Press, 1999.
(Grace Dong Enping, 2004)

Vampire
In Gothic literature, the figure of the vampire may most significantly be read as a
symbol of variable fluidity and volatile mutability. Most obviously, as a shape-
shifter, the Count in Bram Stoker’s Dracula possesses the ability to metamorphose
into various animals, for instance, rats and wolves. He is also highly mobile and
able to move both across geographical boundaries and within the country with
effortless ease. In addition, this transformative power reflects his liminal position
as one who, while crossing boundaries and stepping over established thresholds,
also occupies both spaces simultaneously. For instance, as the Undead, he is
neither dead nor alive, neither human nor inhuman, because he is all these.
Furthermore, it remains questionable as to whether he is to be seen as a creature of
human devolution because of his bestial appetites or as superior to man because of
his supernatural strength and abilities. Thus, as a figure which resists strict
classification and definition, he is viewed as a terrifying monstrosity because he
cannot be categorically pinned down. Put in context, the obsession with boundaries
and borders reflects the pervading sense of unease and instability with the invasion
of foreign elements into England, be it capital, immigrants, or religion, brought
about by changes in Victorian society. The vampire is thus indicative of the deep
anxieties in the dissolution of distinctions in class, gender, race, and nationality
underlying the nineteenth century, all of which ultimately threaten the self. Indeed,
if the vampire is mutable and indefinable, the self, defined by opposition to the
former, also becomes difficult to locate. As such, the vampire critically
interrogates and challenges boundaries between self and other by highlighting the
instability of identity in the vampire and, by extension, in the self.
(Irene Chong, 2006)

VAMPIRISM / VAMPYRISM
Vampirism is an important and popular facet in Gothic Literature. The theory
Vampirism emanates from the root word Vampire. The basic definition for
Vampire is a “corpse that sucks blood for the purpose of resisting decomposition”.
Vampires belong to the myth in today’s world. There are many connotations that
belong to the notion vampires. They are seen as something miraculous, a result of
imagination, and as the masterpiece of the work of the devil. Besides there are
believes that vampires are actually people who die from plague, poison,
hydrophobia, drunkenness and any epidemical malady. These people were thought
to have the chances “to return” as their blood coagulates with more difficulty.
Besides, some of them were buried alive as there was the fear of the spreading of
the disease in those times.
Vampirism, in Gothic literature, was introduced by Sheridan Le Fanu, in his
short novel “Carmilla”. The protagonist vampire in Carmilla is a female- a
vampire countess. But vampirism came into heightened highlight after the
publication of Bram Stoker’s “Dracula”. Unlike “Carmilla”, the setting for Dracula
is in Transylvania (or Wallachia), and the Dracula himself is a male. The central
for the character is derived from Voycode (Prince) Dracula, a notorious, fifteenth
century warrior who claimed war against the Turks, also well known as Vlad the
Impaler. Consequently, the name Dracula, in the Wallachian language, also means
Devil.
Vampirism, too introduces the idea of immortality in literature-the idea of never-
ending life in the expense of others. It is an unique believe in after life and in the
rejuvenating powers of blood that produces or creates a vampire. Thus the dead
have to get blood to sustain their immortal after life, either through sacrifice, where
blood is offered to them or they take it themselves from living mortals. Blood, is
recreated as a gothic element, an important aspect of Vampirism. In all literature
works touching on Vampirism, the element of blood is rampantly established.
Besides, vampires are always portrayed as to be creatures of the night, pale and
ghastly. They are sensitive to the broad daylight, despise the smell of garlic and are
sensitive to holy emblems that belong to the Catholic Church.
Modern age have made the concept Vampirism even more bolder, vampire-
characters are romanticized and cast upon new light, where, there are more often
than not, stereotyped as ardent lovers pursuing lost lovers or Evil in quest of the
world by being against the Good. Besides, written literature by famous writers like
Ann Rice, we have movies like “Interview with the Vampire” and “Blade”, to
name a few, to bring forth the idea of Vampirism.
“The Gothic and Romantic era was naturally drawn to the mysteries of life and
death, satanic influences, and the perverse capacity of lovers to draw the life-force
one from the other. Before the end of the 18th century a number of poets – Burger,
Goethe, Coleridge – had explored vampiric themes…..over the course of next
twenty years vampirism enjoyed an artistic vogue that enrolled the most illustrious
of the Romantics,….Keats, Shelley and Byron…” (The Origins of Dracula, Clive
Leatherdale)
An excerpt from Lord Byron’s “The Giaour”
But first on earth, as Vampyre sent,
Thy corpse shall from its tomb be rent;
Then ghastly haunt thy native place,
And suck the blood of thy entire race.

(Kavitha Kaliappan, 2004)

Vampirism
Gothic is a parasite. It manifests as a mutant third limb—hideous, deformed,
drawing attention to its own strangeness; its feeds off the body of its parent text (its
host), be that a novel, a city, or a prevalent current of thought. The elements found
throughout Gothic literature predominantly perform a subversive function, which
aim to undermine the Self, the parent, to which Gothic relates as a negative image
of, its inverse. The process of vampirism is viewed as being debilitating to the
host, which will eventually be leeched of its essence and then destroyed. Yet the
central tenet of vampirism can be approached, not as residing upon the draining of
the host, but as a total dependence upon it. Gothic reproduces itself as if in a
mirror, revealing its contingent nature, its reliance on the existence of a positive
body to which it can attach. To recall the doppelganger effect, Gothic, as
reflection, cannot exist without its host; the moment the host steps away from that
mirror, so too does Gothic, and its significances, disappear. The Gothic genre,
therefore, cannot be self-sustaining, but inextricably an extension of its parent—
something attached, following after, indebted to. The textual vampirism of Gothic
narratives is frequently re-enacted within its motifs, self-reflexively (or perhaps
self-consciously) replaying, within the unearthing of its host’s anxieties, the
conditions of its own dependence. In Jekyll and Hyde, for example, Hyde grows
out of Jekyll and lives off the doctor’s income. Yet the threat of Hyde’s
domination of Jekyll only results in the destruction of the pair, as Jekyll, perceiving
Hyde’s power, is driven to the final resort of suicide to avoid being overcome (an
alternative reading of this would be that Jekyll, in trying to expel Hyde, recognises
his attempts to be futile and kill himself in order to destroy his negative
image). Frankenstein and his monster are another pair: both are bound by the
desire to eliminate the other; yet the monster’s hate for its creator is so closely tied
in with its love (indeed, its very reason for existence, whether driven by one
emotion or the other, nevertheless revolve around the person of Frankenstein) that
it delivers himself into the inferno along with the body of its victim.
(Low Yi Qing, 2006)

Violence
Violence, like over-determined symbols in Gothic literature, functions as much as
an act of social interrogation as it is an act of affirmation. In both Frankenstein and
Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, strict social mores and policing that prompt the disastrous,
transgressive reactions of repressed selves are manifested in the physical violence
wrought by Frankenstein’s and Dr Jekyll’s doubles, the monster and Mr Hyde.
Here, violence also highlights class anxieties where the repressed working class,
like Frankenstein’s self-educated monster, rebels violently against social masters
like Frankenstein. Human superficiality that incites Frankenstein’s monster’s
violence also operates to reflect the monstrosity in society itself.
Apart from interrogating social norms, scientific advancement and its monstrous
power, building on the Promethean over-reacher theme, are also examined in its
production of violent figures and emotional violence, like that experienced by
Frankenstein and Dr Lanyon after witnessing what science can achieve. Here,
gothic atavism of regression alongside material and scientific progress is
manifested in the figures of Jekyll and Hyde, where the latter’s regression is
demonstrated in his ape-like appearance and, more significantly, in his disregard of
human moral codes—his violence. Yet, while violence undermines and questions
the adequacies of law, it also serves to affirm social codes. The violence of staking
in Dracula, for instance, acts as a social cleansing ritual of removing figures that
threaten social instability and miscegenation. Here, the violence of staking Lucy,
as is the mutilation of Elizabeth in Frankenstein, also takes on phallic terms to
affirm masculinity in an age of increasing sexual anxieties.
(Sophia Koh, 2006)

Gothic Wasteland
Gothic narratives often play out amidst the most blighted of settings. The
barrenness and harshness of these primal landscapes often depicts allegorically the
spiritual impoverishment and internal desolation that many of the characters of
these novels experience. The wasteland of the gothic novel is the ugly sister of the
civilized urban cityscape, lacking even the rustic charm of rural, pastoral land.
Within the city, civility and the hierarchy of social order prevail, while in the
wasteland no such laws and norms govern life, which grows indiscriminately and
in unforeseeable ways. It is altogether unwholesome and inimical to civilized
human life, which often visibly distorts and reverts to base primal instinct while it
resides there. Wild and untamed, the wasteland suggests regressive superstition in
its lack of civilization, defying penetration by the reasoning mind. Prehistoric
dwellings mark Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Grimpen Mire in The Hound of the
Baskervilles; once the abode of savage Neolithic man, it now plays host to gypsies
and an escaped convict, creatures living on the fringes of society, the civilized
man’s other.
Where the urban setting is associated with life and mobility, the gothic
wasteland presents its opposites – it is filled with ever-present danger and death,
while its untamed bounds restrict rather than facilitate travel. In Mary Shelley’s
Frankenstein, the bleak Arctic landscape threatens to freeze Robert Walton’s ship
in place – death literally by stasis. Likewise, the blasted Grimpen Mire around the
Baskerville estate in the The Hound of the Baskervilles entraps travelers and
animals in sticky mud, into which they sink to their deaths. Arctic blizzards and
rolling fog respectively also occur in these areas, extending the gothic trope of
obscurity to the land itself, waylaying the unwary and concealing misdeeds.
Treacherous and inhospitable, gothic wastelands represent Nature and by extension
human nature in crisis, or in a state of infirmity or insanity.
(Kenneth Tan, 2006)

Weather:
Weather plays an important function in gothic literature, and remains one of the
keys in decoding the inner landscape of the protagonists. Often present in gothic
novels not only as a form of sympathetic background, certain elements of weather
are typically used to mirror and magnify the feelings of the protagonist, to establish
moods, and to underscore the action of the story. For instance, the use of fog
within the gothic novel is a convention often used to obscure objects by reducing
visibility and changing the outward appearances of truth; and storms, when they
make their appearance, frequently accompany important events and characters.
Bad weather, in particular, is often associated with the supernatural, as well as
being the birthing landscape of the imagination. Storms are perceived as harbingers
of evil, and often present both a reflection and refraction of the inner self of the
protagonist, an externalization of internal fears and conflict. Weather can also
function as a site of displacement of fears, when they are projected onto the storm
itself. In Le Fanu’s novel Uncle Silas, the main protagonist, Maud’s fears for her
future after her father’s death are both underscored by the approaching storm, and
also displaced onto it.
Weather has also acquired a certain predictability in its interpretation in gothic
literature; a feature that can easily be, and is often parodied in gothic works. There
is the sense that readers are habitually lured into reading the weather as codes
signifying the protagonist’s inner landscape, and are ultimately unable to resist
assuming heavily overdetermined meanings in the relationship between the
weather and the inner self, thereby illustrating the gothic nature of the text by
tempting one to oversimplify its reading, and yet simultaneously contributing to
the destabilizing sense of gothic unease by having its meaning perceived through a
different set of codes that are ultimately arbitrary.

(Chang Keng Mun, 2004)