Meanwhile, Dr. Seward must also look after a patient at an insane asylum. Things continue to go wrong, Lucy’s mother passes away, and eventually Lucy dies too. In between and during these events, author Bram Stoker skillfully utilizes the gothic elements “omens, portents, and visions”, “women in distress”, and “metonymy of gloom and horror.” One cleverly used gothic element in Dracula is “omens, portents, and visions.” For example, Jonathan mentions an old woman telling him, “It is the eve of St. George’s Day. Do you not know that tonight, when the clock strikes midnight, all the evil things in the world will have full sway?” (5). The old woman at the hotel desperately wanted him to postpone his journey.
Readers feel uneasy and in terror after reading the novel. That type of book is for people who like gothic reading. Gothic novels focus on mysterious and supernatural and that’s what Victor wanted to create, a human out of parts of dead bodies for scientific experimentation. To show he can create a human. Victor lived in a gothic area, Europe – Switzerland and Germany with old buildings, dungeons, towers, dark laboratories.
Dracula diffidently contains gloom and horror. There are wolves howling at the Count’s command, Jonathan gets trapped in a room with the three female vampires, and the females cackle is spooky. The presence of gore also proves that Dracula contains horror. Dracula drinks blood, and to kill the vampires stakes where driven through their hearts. Dracula is Gothic literature
Gothic horror was a common genre of use in the time Frankenstein was written. This was a time of great novels such as Dracula and Hound of the Baskervilles. Gothic horror is traditionally set in dark castles and countryside with eerie moaning music and bad weather Written in 1818 Frankenstein is the deeply disturbing tale of a monstrous unnamed creation that was created in the name of science. Huge and strong, the creature created by Victor Frankenstein kills and murders many throughout the tale, but considering his tragic beginnings I must ask, who is the real monster in this gothic tale of horror? Frankenstein is cleverly written in two parts.
Explore the ways Shelley uses setting to contribute to the gothic concept of the novel. Shelley uses setting as a vital contribution to the gothic concept of the novel; Mary said “The very room...he glassy lakes and the high Alps beyond”, would be the pivotal settings in her novel. Shelley knew from this stage that exterior and interior settings would be significant; interior “dark room” which refers to Victor’s laboratory of “filthy creation” in Chapter 4, an epitome of the gothic genre revealing a sense of darkness and seclusion mirroring the eponymous character Frankenstein. The idea of the lake and high Alps can be observed as being influenced by the Romantic poets, Percy and Wodsworth on nature being a restorative agent. Hence Shelley’s use of the exterior setting of the Arctic, which unravels the framework of the novel through epistolary form.
The main conflict in “Blithe Spirit” is a conflict of love; the ghost of Elvira haunting the couple causes tension between them that brings up deeper problems of the couple. The climax occurs when Madam Arcati tries to get rid of Elvira, after Ruth has died, and instead brings Ruth’s ghost into the house as well. The entire play took place in the house of Charles and Ruth; the design elements were relevant
Antigone believes that without burying her brother he will not have a good after-life. Antigone even goes as far as burying him twice. Antigone is more admirable in that she is not selfish. She cared for her brother so much that she would go through all this trouble to give him a good after-life. She wanted to marry Haimon but sacrificed this to bury her brother.
In 1764 Horace Walpole combined horror and romance in his novel The Castle of Ortranto. He effectively created the gothic novel. Tyrants, villains, bandits, maniacs, Byronic heroes, persecuted maidens, femme’s fatales, madwomen, magicians, vampires, werewolves, monsters demons, revenants, ghosts, perambulating skeletons, wandering lew, and the devil are all characters included in Gothic fiction. As I mentioned, Gothic literature contains Byronic heroes. Byronic heroes were used to describe Lord Byron by his jilted lover, Lady Caroline.
In Laura Whitcomb’s A Certain Slant of Light, Helen begins her journey as an unseen and unheard spirit, clinging to one human at a time and fearing her unknown past. At the heart of the storm, the ghost can feel real eyes on her, creating a connection that cannot be satisfied between a spirit and a human, so that she is encouraged to take over a human girl’s body in order to be with him. In her new form, memories of her mysterious past slowly return, transforming Helen as she realizes that she knew everything all along but her guilt was clouding the truth. Helen is a confused ghost, trapped in a world where no one can sense her presence. Even more painful is the fact that she remembers very little about her previous life: “I [can] remember my name, my age, that I [am] a woman, but death swallowed the rest” (4).
Two significant gothic works include Bram Stoker’s infamous story Dracula and Christabel a long narrative poem by Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s. This essay will discuss these texts in relation to specific gothic tropes that surround the female protagonists and how they compare and contrast. Bram Stoker’s Dracula is a classic example of gothic tropes in literature; published in 1897 the story is set in England and Eastern Europe. The main female protagonist character Miss Mina Murray/Harker is a young meek schoolmistress who marries the male protagonist and both are victimized by Count Dracula. Miss Lucy Westenra is Mina’s best friend and subsequently opposite in characteristics; she is a vivacious young woman who becomes Dracula’s first victim.