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Children in Gothic Fiction: Dialectics of In-betweenness

June 1, 2018

academia, ambiguity, children, criticism, Gothic, time

Note: the following article on children in Gothic fiction s a modified excerpt (pp. 96-97) from my doctoral dissertation, “Time is Everything with Him”: The Concept of the Eternal Now in Nineteenth-Century Gothic, which can be downloaded (for free) from the repository of the Tampere University Press. For a list of my other academic publications, see here.

Children in Gothic fiction possess extraordinary allusive power. The reason is that they personify in graspable terms the ambiguous area between past and future. Children in Gothic texts become a link that both separates and connects the old and the new.

Essentially, the Gothic child becomes a metaphor for the eternal present. It carries the past within – both literally, as the continuation of the parents’ genetic code, as well as metaphorically, as the continuation of a cultural, social, or simply family tradition – yet it is also the future. More important, still, it is a potential future, that is, it is neither determined nor materialized.

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Dracula’s Attack on Mina: A Core Moment

May 21, 2018

Criticism

academia, criticism, Gothic, literature, postcolonialism

Note: the following article analyzing Count Dracula’s attack on Mina Harker (in Bram Stoker’s Dracula) is a modified excerpt (pp. 123-124) from my doctoral dissertation, “Time is Everything with Him”: The Concept of the Eternal Now in Nineteenth-Century Gothic, which can be downloaded (for free) from the Tampere University Press pages. For a list of my other academic publications, see the related page of my website.

Dracula’s Attack on Mina: The Issue of Ambiguity

The borders of the attack scene are somewhat blurry. Not only because the attack is implied to have taken place over a period of several nights, as Dracula tells Mina “it is not the first time, or the second, that your veins have appeased my thirst!” (Stoker 2003, 306), but also because the events that lead to this attack are similarly hazy.

Examining the facts from the night between September 30th and October 1st, Mina mentions how she cannot remember how she fell asleep but that she does recall an eerie stillness covering everything (Ibid, 274). What she construes as dreams or her imagination is in actual fact Count Dracula in the form of mist, invading the room like a “pillar of cloud” with red eyes (Ibid, 275).

Initially Mina is fascinated by the pair of red eyes that shine in the dark, but horror overcomes her when she recalls the three female vampires Jonathan encountered back in Transylvania and Dracula’s castle.

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Religion in A Christmas Carol

May 15, 2018

Criticism

academia, criticism, Gothic, literature, religion

Note: the following article on religion in A Christmas Carol is a modified excerpt (pp. 112-115) from my doctoral dissertation, “Time is Everything with Him”: The Concept of the Eternal Now in Nineteenth-Century Gothic, which can be downloaded (for free) from the repository of the Tampere University Press. For a list of my other academic publications, see here.

You can also find an article about religion in Bram Stoker’s Dracula and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein

Religion in A Christmas Carol: a remarkably Secular Affair

Although religion in A Christmas Carol is mostly absent, the text still creates a framework of otherness based on Scrooge’s background and, in particular, his possible Jewishness. His occupation as a moneylender and the fact that he does not celebrate Christmas would have been obvious characteristic markers of Jewish origins for that time. Such stereotypes were not uncommon in Dickens’s works at large.

In Oliver Twist, the character of Fagin is referred to as “the Jew” almost three hundred times and the novel abounds in descriptions “that directly link him to Judas Iscariot and even Satan” (Muller 2003, xxvii), with connotations of the classic depiction of the Wandering Jew also present (Felsenstein 1995, 241). The process of shifting from a racially motivated wariness – if not outright hostility – to an absolution has been suggested to exist within Dickens’s works, although not without controversy, as Grossman argues:

[T]his understanding of Dickens’ Jews elides how Dickens’ narrators engage the problem of narrating this racial and religious other. This elision has most obviously resulted in an institutionalized disregard for Dickens’ final 1867 revision of Oliver Twist, in which he only selectively deleted the term “the Jew”. (1996, 37; emphasis in the original)

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