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However, a reading that considers the mother-figure and the related emotional complex of female desire and creativity will show the excess of the romance in gothic texture. The recognition of gothic mothers started with Moers’s well-known reading of Frankenstein as a birth myth ( 1978 , 93); Fleenor reads the ‘quest-for-mother motif’ as structuring
originality was to be found within the Gothic, with Drake in ‘On Gothic Superstition’ (1798) going so far as to locate the inspirational presence of spectres within the natural world (spectres dismissed by Young as the product of a debased imagination in Night Thoughts ). Death and the creative imagination were given a new affiliation in Frankenstein (1818, revised 1831), where Frankenstein can be
’), and Mary Shelley ( Frankenstein ), all of which are cited in more or less explicit terms in Duncker’s text, with a particular emphasis on Shelley’s novel. However, the novel is not a pure exercise in intertextual virtuosity; instead, it reads as a dizzying and dangerous experiment that, through the citing and reinterpretation of Oedipal scripts, participates in a poiesis of kinship that erodes binary
-based environment are inappropriate to urban capitalism. The inadequacy of the workers to their new situation is rendered in all the social writings of the period in terms of inarticulacy and unsteadiness – characteristics of children (infant = unable to speak; cf Beer, G, in Barker, 1978). But Gaskell also sees that the manufacturers have in a sense created this class of people, and have therefore a functional responsibility towards them. In Chapter 15, explaining the growth of class-antagonism, Elizabeth Gaskell uses the image of Frankenstein and his monster (making the common
. The daughter of Godwin and Wollstonecraft read Goethe’s novel in 1815, and her own writings further explore estrangement from the story of Werther as a source of horror. A number of critics have explored Frankenstein ’s connections with The Sorrows of Werther – Werther is one of the books that the Creature employs to make sense of his life. While the mention of Werther is brief and restricted to a single passage, its influence is more pervasive with respect to Frankenstein ’s epistolary form, love triangles, allusion to other literary works within its
ties. As early as 1818, the biological basis of kinship ties were radically challenged by Mary Shelley in the form of Victor Frankenstein’s relationship with his monster, who exclaims that they are ‘bound by ties only dissoluble by the annihilation of one of us’. 6 Starting from the assumption that Gothic fiction is a key site where sociocultural figurations of the family are negotiated, this
pair of binoculars and a pair of stockings over my face? These are just some of the things I cannot explain … but come with us on a journey into the supernatural … up the eerie passage of the inexplicable … On 10 March 1968 we are told that Baron Frankenstein ‘is notorious round here: he’s got the biggest Schloss in
3 Memory and the child witness in ‘art-house horror’ ‘Cinema can lay claim to the child, as the child lays claim to cinema’, writes Vicky Lebeau, citing the sequence where Ana (Ana Torrent) and her sister Isabel (Isabel Tellería), two girls living in the post-war Spain of the 1940s, watch James Whale’s Frankenstein (1931) in a makeshift cinema in Víctor Erice’s El espíritu de la colmena: ‘the sequence yields one of the most compelling images of children’s look at the screen, or the look of the child caught up in the wonders, and horrors of the moving image
Frankenstein and Dracula , and also from Dracula Van Helsing’s graveyard confrontation with Lucy and his final battle with the Count, of Kharis’s attack on John Banning in The Mummy , of the openings of The Hound of the Baskervilles and The Curse of the Werewolf , of Dirk Bogarde throwing a chair through a wall in So Long at the Fair , of Alan’s death and Dracula’s resurrection in Dracula – Prince of Darkness , of the
(or freezing, or removal) of the threat, although it may return in sequels and remakes (as it so often happened from Karl Freund’s The Mummy (1932) to Dracula’s many incarnations; from Frankenstein (James Whale, 1931) to Bride of Frankenstein (James Whale, 1935) to Son of Frankenstein (Rowland V. Lee, 1939); from Jaws (Steven Spielberg, 1975) to Jaws 2 (Jeannot Szwarc, 1978) to Jaws 3-D