The phantasmigoric nature of the Gothic genre.

Authors Avatar

        The gothic genre has always placed a heavy emphasis on morbidness and sexuality, and sometimes both. Perhaps the most overtly sexualised gothic novel is the tale of Dracula. First published, in 1897, at the height of the sexually repressed Victorian era. The public were fascinated by this novel, as it expressed so much of their 'improper' unspoken feeling and curiosity. The imagery of sucking someone's neck to drink his or her blood is very symbolic and suggestive of blatant sexuality. This novel masked intense sexuality, but subliminally, the reader could ascertain what was occurring, using only slight inference. This titillated the prude Victorian public of the late 1800s. Stoker created a compromise where sex was extricated from its recognisable form, to the point where it was not only accomplished without genitalia, but also without guilt, and without love. Stoker had successfully projected the sexual undertones to a realm of fantasy, whereby it was deemed acceptable to a priggish Victorian public. If the novel had been set in London, and the innuendo had been in relationship to a Middle English household, it is highly probable that the book would have been met with righteous indignation, and never scaled the heights of popularity which it ultimately succeeded in doing.

         The phantasmigoric nature of the Gothic has always enabled it to be slightly more ‘venturesome’ in its subject matter, tackling issues ranging from incest to paedophilia, even to necrophilia, which would never be acceptable in more conventional genres. Perhaps some of the reason behind the success of Dracula lies with the presence of aggressive feminine sexuality. Stoker describes Harker as he “lay quiet, … in an agony of delightful anticipation...The girl went on her knees and bent over me simply gloating. There was a deliberate voluptuousness which was both thrilling and repulsive.” This is a very pertinent extract, as it conveys the aggressive desire of the dominant females, and Harker is earlier described as observing the three vampires from ‘under [his] eyelashes, something reminiscent of demure and passive femininity. Sexual temptation leading to sexual control is something which worried Victorian patriarchy. Indeed, in Jane Eyre, Rochester says of Bertha Mason "I was not sure of the existence of one virtue in her nature: I had marked neither modesty, nor benevolence, nor candour, nor refinement in her mind or manners" but he married her because "my senses were excited". The role reversal in Dracula perhaps struck a chord with its audience, titillated by the idea that women could indeed be sexually strident, and perhaps played on the male fear of emasculation and enslavement.

Join now!

        The simultaneous experience of the gothic protagonist being thrilled and repulsed is a gothic convention. In the same way that Harker felt a 'wicked, burning desire to be kissed by those red lips', when he is surrounded by the vampires, Kipps is intruiged rather than repulsed by the sickening phsyical form of the woman in black which he outlines so graphically. He speaks of 'only the thinnest layer of flesh....tautly stretched and strained across her bones', and then feels an 'upsurge of concern' for her. The woman in black is perhaps representative of Kipps' fledgeling adult sexuality which both fascinates ...

This is a preview of the whole essay