“Corridors of Repression:” Gothic Monsters and their Unearthing of Societal Anxieties

 

“Corridors of Repression:” Gothic Monsters and their Unearthing of Societal Anxieties

While Charles E. Prescott and Grace A. Giorgio’s essay “Vampiric Affinities: Mina Harker and the Paradox of Femininity in Bram Stoker’s Dracula” mainly discusses the female identity in Bram Stoker’s Dracula it also addresses the ways in which the vampire functions as a gothic character, one whose cultural meaning has shifted over decades. Prescott and Giorgio analyze scenes from the novel and argue that Mina’s perverse interest in Dracula coincides with the changing ideas about female independence in the 19^th century. As the “long-standing conception of proper femininity comes under suspicious attack” not only by the vampiric Dracula but by the new independent woman, those who believed in old traditions feared this degree of female agency and viewed it as monstrous (487). While the Gothic novel may seem to be about the supernatural, it is not necessarily “divorced from the political” (498). As Teresa Mangum argues the “anxieties that animate [Gothic novels] are inextricably bound up with [are] the most deeply rooted dilemmas facing late Victorian culture” (qtd. in Prescott and Giorgio 487). For example, in the case of Dracula, Count Dracula personifies the social anxieties of the time and “terrorize[s]” the Victorian ideals about womanhood. 

Gothic works often attempt to address hidden or secretive desires of a group or person and turn those “non-normative” desires into something haunting. The “gothic takes us on a tour through the labyrinthine corridors of repression, giv[ing] us glimpses of the skeletons of dead desires and mak[ing] them move again” (qtd. in Prescott and Giorgio 506). According to David Punter, Gothic “writers work‒‒consciously or unconsciously‒‒on the fringe of the acceptable, for it is on this borderland that fear resides” (qtd. in Prescott and Giorgio 506). Gothic writers perhaps use creatures such as vampires and ghosts to symbolize abstract fears such as homosexuality or women’s rights, because these too once seemed like unimaginable things. Also, these creatures tend to hunt or prey on their victims in a way that mimics the unrelenting force of societal change. On the other hand, the creatures’ magnetic qualities could show how that same change could be deeply appealing. Monsters “are…infinitely attractive” (506). They can be physically attractive or their place in the work could consume another character’s existence making them become obsessed with this being.

The Gothic’s transgressive qualities can be debated. As Prescott and Giorgio argue, “literalizing the threat that the human who transgresses will indeed be treated as a monster as well” can actually encourage normativity (507). The Gothic narrative “encourage[s] both consciously and subconsciously to enact the privileged scripts of normative identity as the only thinkable mode of being, the subject must always exist precariously close to falling into the realm of the abject, or, in more Gothic terms, the monstrous” (507). For example, in vampire fiction, the victim quite literally becomes a monster and is forever bonded with monstrous blood. Prescott and Giorgio argue that the Gothic narrative “demands closure,” but its closure “fail[s] to contain the transgressions the story has put into play” (507). But while one can view the “closure” that comes at the end of the work as a curbing of progressive ideals, others might cling to the Gothic’s transgressive qualities, seeing the medium as subversive.

Works Cited

Prescott, Charles E., and Grace A. Giorgio. “Vampiric Affinities: Mina Harker and the Paradox of Femininity in Bram Stoker’s Dracula.” Victorian Literature and Culture, vol. 33, no. 2, Sept. 2005, pp. 487–515.