Gothic and Horror Fiction
In this final assignment I will talk about the patriarchal fear of female sexuality. I will also be dealing with a brief summary of the female figure in the gothic novel. To begin with, I will give a brief summary of the changes that experimented the topics of the nineteenth century novel; then I will comment on the description which some scholars give about the woman of the nineteenth century. I will also exemplify the patriarchal fear of female sexuality by using two of the texts studied in the lectures; Dracula (1897) by Bram Stoker, and The Turn of the Screw (1898) by Henry James. I will especially focus on the characters of Mina and Lucy while dealing with Dracula, and the governess while dealing with The Turn of the Screw. Finally, I will finish this essay by summing up the content explained throughout the text.
The end of the nineteenth century is known, according to Lily Litvak, as a real “erotic contamination” (1979), which affected all walks of life and it provided Sigmund Freud some authority to reclaim the importance of the sexuality as a driving force of the entire human acts. Until that moment, the concept of sexuality had been excluded and confined to transgressive ways of living that had little or nothing to do with the marital life. There was from the Church and from the own bourgeois State a campaign of persecution of the premarital sexual relationships or adulterous, showing at all times a granitic intransigence towards the prostitution, the single mothers, the homosexual relationships and other ways of life considered to be sinful and immoral. It is in this climate where resurge the desires for the meat’s flesh which had long been dormant in the European conscience during centuries. As Kilgour states (1995) “the gothic played a significant part in the late eighteenth century debates over the moral reading dangers”. This era witnessed an unprecedented eroticism display, and make art into an immense showcase where it can be contemplated some
The end of the nineteenth century is known, according to Lily Litvak, as a real “erotic contamination” (1979), which affected all walks of life and it provided Sigmund Freud some authority to reclaim the importance of the sexuality as a driving force of the entire human acts. Until that moment, the concept of sexuality had been excluded and confined to transgressive ways of living that had little or nothing to do with the marital life. There was from the Church and from the own bourgeois State a campaign of persecution of the premarital sexual relationships or adulterous, showing at all times a granitic intransigence towards the prostitution, the single mothers, the homosexual relationships and other ways of life considered to be sinful and immoral. It is in this climate where resurge the desires for the meat’s flesh which had long been dormant in the European conscience during centuries. As Kilgour states (1995) “the gothic played a significant part in the late eighteenth century debates over the moral reading dangers”. This era witnessed an unprecedented eroticism display, and make art into an immense showcase where it can be contemplated some
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