Gothic Critical Quotes

The dilemma of the critic has always been that if he knows enough to speak with authority, he knows too much to speak with detachment." (A Qualified Farewell)

Adieu, sucky speed-reading critics and reviewers!" Terry Dare, gothic author in Blatty's book "Elsewhere", just before he crosses over.

A character like that," he said to himself—"a real little passionate force to see at play is the finest thing in nature. It's finer than the finest work of art—than a Greek bas-relief, than a great Titian, than a Gothic cathedral. It's very pleasant to be so well treated where one had least looked for it. I had never been more blue, more bored, than for a week before she came; I had never expected less that anything pleasant would happen. Suddenly I receive a Titian, by the post, to hang on my wall—a Greek bas-relief to stick over my chimney-piece. The key of a beautiful edifice is thrust into my hand, and I'm told to walk in and admire. My poor boy, you've been sadly ungrateful, and now you had better keep very quiet and never grumble again." The sentiment of these reflexions was very just; but it was not exactly true that Ralph Touchett had had a key put into his hand. His cousin was a very brilliant girl, who would take, as he said, a good deal of knowing; but she needed the knowing, and his attitude with regard to her, though it was contemplative and critical, was not judicial. He surveyed the edifice from the outside and admired it greatly; he looked in at the windows and received an impression of proportions equally fair. But he felt that he saw it only by glimpses and that he had not yet stood under the roof. The door was fastened, and though he had keys in his pocket he had a conviction that none of them would fit. She was intelligent and generous; it was a fine free nature; but what was she going to do with herself? This question was irregular, for with most women one had no occasion to ask it. Most women did with themselves nothing at all; they waited, in attitudes more or less gracefully passive, for a man to come that way and furnish them with a destiny. Isabel's originality was that she gave one an impression of having intentions of her own. "Whenever she executes them," said Ralph, "may I be there to see!

The most succssful monsters overdetermine these tansgressions to become, in Judith Halberstam's evocative phrase, 'technologies of monstrosity' that condense and process different and even contradictory anxieties about category and border. Some critics hold that the genre speaks to universal, primitive taboos about the very foundational elements of what it means to be human, yet the ebb and flow of the Gothic across the modern period invites more historical readings. Indeed, one of the princial border breaches in the Gothic is history itself- the insidious leakage of the pre-modern past into the skeptical, allegedly enlightened present. The Gothic, Robert Mighall suggests, can be thought of as a way of relating to the past and its legacies.

The historian Cassiodorus believed that the selective destruction of Alaric, as regards the Greek monuments, was of good effect. Alaric had some taste and was awed by really great art. The Greeks were only human, and all their work could not have been excellent. But almost all their ancient work that survived the ravages of Alaric was of unsurpassed excellence. There is abominable and worthless ancient Greek art in Asia Minor, in Constantinople, in Thebes, in Eritrea, in the Cyclades and other islands. There is little or none of this worthless ancient art surviving in the path of the Gothic Greek adventure; not in Athens, or Megara or Corinth or Argos. Sparta does not figure in the account at all; it never had art. It is said that Alaric destroyed half of the art of Greece. It may have been the worst half. He was a critic of unusual effectiveness.

What did you think of Rebecca on tv? I don’t think it had dated too badly, but some things hit me – and it was silly, the way they made Rebecca hit her head on a block, instead of being shot by Maxim. And they muffed the fancy-dress ball, and the wreck: it was all too hurried, one did not know what was happening. In the book she had to go through the whole Ball without speaking to Maxim, who was on a hard chair beside her, and then it was in early dawn the wreck came. I suppose you thought to yourself, now Peg would have been much better than Olivier, and it would have worked out rather well, imagining Peg thinking of his first wife, and being plunged in deep thoughts ...! Of course it was old-fashioned in 1938 when it was written – I remember critics saying it was a queer throwback to the 19th-century Gothic novel. But I shall never know quite why it seized upon everyone’s imagination, not just teenagers and shop girls, like people try to say now, but every age, and both sexes.

... Bram Stoker, working in a largely intuitive manner, and no doubt propelled by more than a few personal demons, managed to tap a well of archetypal motifs so deep and persistent that they can assume the shape of almost any critical container.

Poe’s literary importance is so vast that it’s hard to believe that he accomplished so much in such an abbreviated lifetime. With “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” he invented detective fiction and became master of the form. He remains the undisputed king of gothic horror. His poetry appealed to the masses and critics alike. His own criticism, while often stinging, peeled back the veneer on the old boy’s club that was American letters.

All " knowing" of Nature, even the exactest, is based on a religious faith. The pure mechanics that the physicist has set before himself as the end-form to which it is his task (and the purpose of all this imaginationmachinery) to reduce Nature, presupposes a dogma — namely, the religious world-picture of the Gothic centuries. For it is from this world-picture that the physics peculiar to the Western intellect is derived. There is no science that is without unconscious presuppositions of this kind, over which the researcher has no control and which can be traced back to the earliest days of the awakening Culture. There is no Natural science without a precedent Religion. In this point there is no distinction between the Catholic and the Materialistic views of the world — both say the same thing in different words. Even atheistic science has religion; modern mechanics exactly reproduces the contemplativeness of Faith. When the Ionic reaches its height in Thales or the Baroque in Bacon, and man has come to the urban stage of his career, his self-assurance begins to look upon critical science, in contrast to the more primitive religion of the countryside, as the superior attitude towards things, and, holding as he thinks the only key to real knowledge, to explain religion itself empirically and psychologically — in other words, to "conquer" it with the rest. Now, the history of the higher Cultures shows that "science" is a transitory spectacle, belonging only to the autumn and winter of their life-course.

The Impossible Banquet by Stewart Stafford Awakened by a stinging sun, Radiant wings of flame and gold, I breathe in dawn’s virgin hopes, With icy shards of doubting cold. Am I not my parents' child? Lost my way on a freedom roam, Invitation to a tempting feast, Over family, love, and home. Trapped within the world's crosshairs, Locked down with time to burn, Casting runestones, but too late, For visible escape, I yearn. An obsessive lady by my side, A judge of karma infernal, She took my life with her own hand, Bequeathing a wound eternal. Tomorrow’s hopes are now a ghost, No merciful release to illuminate, I wish to scrub away the past, A vain rebirth to change my fate. But I’m caught in the Reaper's maw, I weep for you who procrastinate, Sold my soul on Devil's Bridge, Then dragged through a fiery gate. Hope, community, society crash, Towering feats of grotesquery, You may not grieve for me who's gone, Time's cruel critic is all you see. © Stewart Stafford, 2023. All rights reserved.

I once loved a guy who fashioned himself as some sort of gothic paradox. He liked to slice his arms in small cuts and spent hours sewing them shut. He liked to bleed, but only a little bit at a time. He tripped out on girls who spun fire, and those who would lay down with his papers in their hands, while they pretended to read and never had a critical word. The real escaped him even when he dressed normal for work, breaking ink pens in the wash.

Gothic is the genre of fear. Our fascination with it is almost always revived during times of instability and panic. In the wake of the French Revolution, the Marquis de Sade described the rise of the genre as 'the inevitable product of the revolutionary shock with which the whole of Europe resounded,' and literary critics in the late eighteenth century mocked the work of early gothic writers Anne Radcliffe and Matthew Lewis by referring to it as 'the terrorist school' of writing. As Fred Botting writes in Gothic, his lucid introduction to the genre, it expresses our unresolved feelings about 'the nature of power, law, society, family and sexuality' and yet is extremely concerned with issues of social disintegration and collapse. It's preoccupied with all that is immoral, fantastic, suspenseful, and sensational and yet prone to promoting middle-class values. It's interested in transgression, but it's ultimately more interested in restitution; it alludes to the past yet is carefully attuned to the present; it's designed to evoke excessive emotion, yet it's thoroughly ambivalent; it's the product of revolution and upheaval, yet it endeavors to contain their forces; it's terrifying, but pretty funny. And, importantly, the gothic always reflects the anxieties of its age in an appropriate package, so that by the nineteenth century, familiar tropes representing external threats like crumbling castles, aristocratic villains, and pesky ghosts had been swallowed and interiorized. In the nineteenth century, gothic horrors were more concerned with madness, disease, moral depravity, and decay than with evil aristocrats and depraved monks. Darwin's theories, the changing roles of women in society, and ethical issues raised by advances in science and technology haunted the Victorian gothic, and the repression of these fears returned again and again in the form of guilt, anxiety, and despair. 'Doubles, alter egos, mirrors, and animated representations of the disturbing parts of human identity became the stock devices,' Botting writes, 'signifying the alienation of the human subject from the culture and language in which s/he is located.' In the transition from modernity to post-modernity, the very idea of culture as something stable and real is challenged, and so postmodern gothic freaks itself out by dismantling modernist grand narratives and playing games. In the twentieth century, 'Gothic [was] everywhere and nowhere,' and 'narrative forms and devices spill[ed] over from worlds of fantasy and fiction into real and social spheres.

Where the African church failed was in not carrying Christianity beyond the Romanized inhabitants of the cities and the great estates, and not sinking roots into the world of the native peoples. Like most regions of the Western empire, such as Gaul and Spain, Africa was divided between Latin-speaking provincials and old-stock natives, who spoke their ancient languages—in this case, varieties of Berber. Unlike these other provinces, though, the African church had made next to no progress in taking the faith to the villages and the neighboring tribes, nor, critically, had they tried to evangelize in local languages. This would not have been an unrealistic expectation, in that already by the fourth century missionaries elsewhere were translating the scriptures into Gothic, and Hunnic languages followed by the sixth century. Evidence of the neglect of the countryside can be found in the letters of Saint Augustine, by far the best known of African bishops, whose vision was sharply focused on the cities of Rome and Carthage; he expressed no interest in the rural areas or peoples of his diocese.3

If you are all set for an enjoyable weekend then simply head towards the magnificent Her Majesty’s Theatre! The popular London Westend theatre is running the award winning London show, The Phantom of the Opera with packed houses. The show has already made its remarkable entry into its third decade. The blockbuster London show by Andrew Lloyd Webber is a complete treat for music lovers. The popular show has won several prestigious awards. The show is set against the backdrop of gothic Paris Opera House. The show revolves around soprano Christine Daae who is enticed by the voice of Phantom. The show features some of the heart touching and spell binding musical numbers such as 'The Music of the Night', 'All I Ask of You' and the infamous title track, The Phantom of the Opera. The Phantom of the Opera is a complete audio visual treat for theatre lovers. In the year 1986, the original production made its debut at the Her Majesty's Theatre featuring Michael Crawford and Sarah Brightman. Sarah was then wife of composer Andrew Lloyd Webber. The popular London musical, The Phantom of the Opera went on becoming a popular show and still London's hottest ticket. The award winning show is a brilliant amalgamation of outstanding design, special effects and memorable score. The show has earned critical acclamation from both the critics and audiences. The show has been transferred to Broadway and is currently the longest running musical. The show is running at the Majestic Theatre and enjoyed brilliant performance across the globe. For Instance, the Las Vegas production was designed specifically with a real lake. In order to celebrate its silver jubilee, there was a glorious concert production at the Royal Albert Hall. The phenomenal production featured Ramin Karimloo and Sierra Boggess as Phantom and Christine. If you are looking for some heart touching love musical the Phantom of the Opera is a must watch. With its wonderfully designed sets, costumes and special effects, the show is a must watch for theatre lovers. The show is recommended for 10+ kids and run for two hours and thirty minutes.

This identifies a central contradiction in the novel. The middle classes represent modernity, money, ambition and a sense of justice. However such a nebulous notion of a social and economic vision is unsustainable once individuals are isolated. Harker, alone in Castle Dracula, is a very different figure than that at the end of the novel as he plays his designated role in the destruction of the Count. The problem with vampirism is that it is too seductive and the fact that Harker is susceptible to its charms suggests *his* latent degeneracy. The Count will just not stay 'Othered'. Chapter 1 discussed this in relation to how Harker is made a 'man' by his encounter with Dracula. The paradox being that the Count represents a model of heroic manliness that he needs to emulate; in this way 'disease' is brought back into 'civilisation' in a way which is familiar from contemporary accounts of degeneration and London. -Victorian Demons: Medicine, Masculinity and the Gothic at the Fin-De-Siecle