Monday, March 8, 2010
Goethe Vampire Poem, The Bride of Corinth
Another classic example from the German RomanticsThe Bride of Corinth
Tuesday, March 2, 2010
thoughts on the gothic wordsworth
All of it is brilliant, earnest, inspiring, convincing--unlike, say, Coleridge, also brilliant, but with loose ends showing, fragments and rough edges, sometimes protesting too much...
Male-Gothic, according to Williams and others, runs along the following lines--
Core fantasies of maternal horror--anxieties about overwhelming, engulfment, being devoured by the powerful "mother" (this is a fantasy of the mother, of course, based on infancy and early childhood)...
Systems and paranoias--godlike Faustian genius, access to secret knowledge, powers over life and death (compensatory in light of that maternal fantasy-horror?), at the borderline of madness or over it...
Violent, objectifying, near-pornographic fantasies of controlling and victimizing women.... (see The Monk)
Tales of exile, wandering, alienation from family and society (Frankenstein monster, the Wandering Jew, the vampire)...
Homophobic fantasies of persecution and conspiracy (overlap with paranoia).
Horror effects--material, physical abominations--filth, contagion, blood, dismemberment. "Fissions"--things fragmenting, swarming, multiplying (like rats, flies, crowds of faces). "Fusions"--things usually separated are superimposed, overlapped, unnatrually conjoined (monsters and nightmares of many kinds).
The sublime in the Gothic mode--its excesses and intensities unsettling and unmooring self-identity rather than being brought back around to its affirmation.
Fragmented, unfinished, sometimes incoherent texts (Christabel? The Monk, again)
Though Wordsworth's powerfully synthetic literary rhetoric seems to handle various negations with ease, might we still catch traces of the Gothic in his work?
If nothing else, maybe we can mark how the wilder side of Gothic is disarmed and domesticated? As if Wordsworth, tremendously resourceful, can pull the emotive intensities of Gothic into his system and put them to his sort of constructive work?
It would be interesting to find a point or points where such employment doesn't quite take, loose threads in the tight weave he makes...
Dorothy with those shooting-lights wild eyes--the engulfing Nature of his younger years which cannot be painted--the ghosts of sex and violence that haunt in The Thorn (instead of being staged dramatically)... That ravaged/ravished grove in "Nutting"--
Male-Gothic, according to Williams and others, runs along the following lines--
Core fantasies of maternal horror--anxieties about overwhelming, engulfment, being devoured by the powerful "mother" (this is a fantasy of the mother, of course, based on infancy and early childhood)...
Systems and paranoias--godlike Faustian genius, access to secret knowledge, powers over life and death (compensatory in light of that maternal fantasy-horror?), at the borderline of madness or over it...
Violent, objectifying, near-pornographic fantasies of controlling and victimizing women.... (see The Monk)
Tales of exile, wandering, alienation from family and society (Frankenstein monster, the Wandering Jew, the vampire)...
Homophobic fantasies of persecution and conspiracy (overlap with paranoia).
Horror effects--material, physical abominations--filth, contagion, blood, dismemberment. "Fissions"--things fragmenting, swarming, multiplying (like rats, flies, crowds of faces). "Fusions"--things usually separated are superimposed, overlapped, unnatrually conjoined (monsters and nightmares of many kinds).
The sublime in the Gothic mode--its excesses and intensities unsettling and unmooring self-identity rather than being brought back around to its affirmation.
Fragmented, unfinished, sometimes incoherent texts (Christabel? The Monk, again)
Though Wordsworth's powerfully synthetic literary rhetoric seems to handle various negations with ease, might we still catch traces of the Gothic in his work?
If nothing else, maybe we can mark how the wilder side of Gothic is disarmed and domesticated? As if Wordsworth, tremendously resourceful, can pull the emotive intensities of Gothic into his system and put them to his sort of constructive work?
It would be interesting to find a point or points where such employment doesn't quite take, loose threads in the tight weave he makes...
Dorothy with those shooting-lights wild eyes--the engulfing Nature of his younger years which cannot be painted--the ghosts of sex and violence that haunt in The Thorn (instead of being staged dramatically)... That ravaged/ravished grove in "Nutting"--
Monday, March 1, 2010
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