Neil Bowen on
The Gothic - Fred Botting
Excess:
“shadows the despairing ecstasies of Romantic idealism and individualism and the uncanny dualities of Victorian realism and decadence” Gothic atmosphere portrays the disturbing return of a feared past (eg. the creature disappeared for 1 year and was forgotten and just when Victor thought himself safe, the creature returned)
Gothic focuses on the negative anxieties of society (eg. “delusions, religious and human evil, mental disintegration”)
“Anxiety of cultural limits and boundaries” -> Frankenstein tries to break these obvious boundaries between life and death. Suggests boundaries are there for a reason because he is punished for breaking them?
The sublime is “evoked by excessive emotion”
“Gothic signifies an over-abundance of imaginative frenzy, untamed by reason and unrestrained by 18th century conventional demands for simplicity, realism or probability”
Transgression:
transgression helps to re-establish values by glorifying villains -> provokes fear of social disintegration
“Threats a spiced with thrills, terrors with delight” -> thrill of overcoming fear
“Transgressing the bounds of reality and possibility, they also challenged reason through their overindulgence in fanciful ideas”
Quote on Duality:
“He himself sees that the monster serves his own destructive urges.”, “Frankenstein knows the monster’s intentions because deep down they are his own”
Duality physically portrayed in the 2011 “Frankenstein” play where actors switch roles to play both monster and creator (highlights similarity between both)
Binary opposition - theoretical opposites that rely on each other