University
Department of Humanities and Social Sciences
Haunting and the Haunted: ghost
stories, films and gender
鬼影幢幢：鬼故事，鬼片，性別
Instructor:
Elizabeth LEE
TA:
Jim WU
19 October 2015
Week 6
Handout 4
I.
The
Gothic: excerpts from Barbara Fuchs’s Romance
(New York: Routledge, 2004)
a.
‘Romancing
the Gothic’
1)
Founding
rationale: ‘By the mid-eighteenth century, literary scholars in Germany,
France, and England were reacting to the dictates of neoclassicism, questioning
its privileging of reason, order and proportion. The gradual construction of a
“Gothic” tradition to counter the classical legacy of Greece and Rome involved
a rediscovery of the literary heritage of the Middle Ages and Renaissance,
which had largely been neglected in favour of the classics’ (117-8)
2)
Origins:
‘In the narrow sense, “Gothic” referred primarily to the production of ancient
Northern Europeans, the Goths or barbarians who had opposed Rom with their own
traditions of liberty and social or organisation’. More broadly, the Gothic
designated everything that was not classical: both the vernacular works of the
Middle Ages, and those Renaissance texts that eschewed the “rediscovered”
classical heritage in favour of “native” traditions’ (118).
3)
Aesthetic
merits: 18th century English critics Richard Hurds said of the
Gothic to be ‘the more sublime and creative poetry … addressing itself solely
or principally to the Imagination’, need not observe the same ‘curious rules of
credibility’ (cited from Fuchs 2004, 118-9). ‘Thus, not only is the Gothic
recuperated, it surpasses the classical in its direct address to the
imagination, becoming the poetic wellspring par excellence’ (119).
b.
Gothic
as a genre
1)
Genre
characteristics: ‘From its beginnings, the Gothic romance, or novel, is
explicitly presented as a mixture of new and old’ (119).
2)
Beginning:
‘The genre is self-consciously inaugurated by Horace Walpole, with The Castle of Otranto (1764), a
fantastically popular tale that has appeared in over 100 editions since ifs
first publication; (119).
3)
Conventions:
‘Otranto established some of the most
enduring conventions of the genre: ancient
castles complete with secret vaults and passageways; family secrets; obscure
prophecies; ghosts and apparitions; hidden identities. More importantly, it
exacerbates the narrative tension attendant on what Richetti calls “persecuted
innocence,” a constant among various forms of popular narrative in the
eighteenth century, which in this case involves an innocent princess pursued by
the lascivious and immortal father of the prince she was to wed’ (119).
4)
Strange
Place: ‘despite Walpole’s emphasis on nature, and the rationality attributed to
his contemporary and what makes the Gothic so popular is precisely its gallery
of marvelous and otherworldly topoi’ (121).
5)
Terror:
‘These “well-wrought scenes of artificial terror which are formed by a sublime
and vigorous imagination,” critics conjured, provided a particular kind of pleasure,
in which the imagination “rejoices in the expansion of its powers,” so that
“the pain of terror is lost in amazement” (121-2).
The
Turn of the Screw (1898),
excerpts from Priscilla Walton’s ‘“He took no notice of her; he looked at me”:
Subjectivities and Sexualities in The Turn of the Screw’ in Peter Beidler’s
edition of The Turn of the Screw
(Boston: Bedford/St Martins’s, 2013) 3rd edition.
1)
Critical
heritage: ‘The Turn of the Screw is one of James’s more enigmatic tales.
Although it was written over a century ago, it continues to intrigue readers
and attract critical and creative attention. It has been transformed into an
opera by Benjamin Britten (first performed in 1954), and has inspired a number
of films, such as The Innocents (1961)’
(348).
2)
Key
issues: gazing, visibility and invisibility, gender panic at the end of
Victorian age, suffragette’s movements, the fear of governess’s sexuality in
the Victorian era, women as unreliable narrator, ghost stories.
II.
Reflections
on ghost stories:
Personal Assignment
Write a short essay on
the treatment of women in Poe’s ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’ and James’s
‘The Turn of the Screw’ in the context of Gothic and ghost stories.
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