Tyler Murphy
Eng 602
Notes and Quotes:
Gothic: New Critical Idiom (Fred Botting)
“A negative aesthetics informs gothic texts.” (pg 2)
“Darkness – an absence of the light associated with sense, security, and knowledge –
characterizes the looks, moods, atmospheres and connotations of the [gothic]” (pg 2)
“Overtly, but ambiguously, not rational depicting disturbances of sanity and security, from
superstitious belief in ghosts or demons, displays of uncontrolled passions, violent emotion or
flights of fancy to portrayals of perversion and obsession.” (pg 2)
“Gothic styles disturb the borders of knowing and conjure up obscure otherworldly
phenomena.” (pg 2)
“Gothic texts are not good in moral, aesthetic or social terms. Their concern is with vice.” (pg 2)
“Definitively negative, gothic fictions appear distinctly anti-modern in their use of customs,
constumes and codes of chivalry associated with feudal power: the gallantry and romanticism
of knights, ladies and martial honour also evoked an era of barbarism, ignorance, tyranny, and
superstition.” (pg 2)
“The invocation occurs in the middle of the eighteenth century in which the promotion of
reason, science, commerce and bourgeois values was in the ascendary […]” (pg 3)
“The past with which gothic writing engages and which it constructs is shaped by the changing
times in which it is composed.” (pg 3)
“[…] Juxtaposes terrors of the negative with an order authorized by reason and morality.” (pg 3)

“Of what a strange nature is knowledge! It clings to the mind, when it has once seized
on it, like a lichen on the rock. I wished sometimes to shake off all thought and feeling;
but I learned that there was but one means to overcome the sensation of pain, and that
was death – a state which I feared yet did not understand.” (pg 119)
“Power, property and paternal lineage combine in the image of the castle. But these sites are
often tempered with decay [...]” (pg 4)

Not the castle, but Frankenstein’s bourgeois upbringing and privilege also lead to his
decay.
“To be independent of social and domestic regulation […] can be pleasurable, dangerous,
exciting, and frightening.” (pg 5)
“Despite the encroachment of horror, a wish to know presses curious heroines forward.” (pg 6)
“The sublime resulted from the disreputed sense of order and a discombobulation of reason,
imagination and feeling: intensities, magnitudes and violent contrasts overwhelmed mental
faculties – evoking terror, awe, wonder – and threatened the eclipse of any subjective unity.”
(pg 7)
“[Monsters will] give shape, moreover, to fears or anxieties, or contain an amorphous and
unpresentable threat in a single image. But only as long as the boundaries separating virtue and
vice, good and evil remain clearly delineated. In the context of monstrosity, the role of
transgression, and the limits and excesses that it makes manifest, concerns both the
delineation of boundaries and the mechanisms – the norms, taboos, prohibitions, - that keep
them in place.” (pg 8)
“Universal or natural guarantees seem to vanish; norms are sustained only by the conjoined
and opposed forces of limit and transgression. Supposedly unchanging laws are opened up.” (pg
9)

Life vs. Death “It is so long before the mind can persuade itself that she, whom we saw
every day, and whose very existence appeared a part of our own, can have departed for
ever – that the brightness of a beloved eye can have been extinguished, and the sound
of a voice so familiar, and dear to the ear, can be hushed, never more to be heard.
These are the reflections of the first days; but when the lapse of time proves the reality
of the evil, then the actual bitterness of grief commences. Yet from whom was not that
rude hand rent away some dear connection? and why should I describe a sorrow which
all have felt, and must feel?” This quote foreshadows the ‘unchanging laws’ having the
ability to be changed by animating nonliving tissue.
“Norm and monster, self and shadow, one is inseparable from the other.” (pg 10)
“Monsters such as vampires, talking bodies, or ghosts are thus constructions indicating how
cultures need to invent or imagine others in order to maintain limits.” (pg 10)
“the Gothic tale set out to combine [Romance and Realism]” “Referred to as ‘Dark
Romanticism.’” (pg 12)
And I chose this last quote not as a means to define the Gothic but just because it was a fun
quote:
“When and where does the gothic genre stop and others, such as magical realism, dark
romance, science fiction, fantasy, occult, horror, cyberpunk, splatterpunk, steampunk, neoVictorian, body horror, slasher, or weird fiction begin?” (pg 15)