Gothic Literature Flashcards
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The Fall of the House of Usher
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Edgar Allan Poe, Roderick Usher, Unnamed narrator, twin sister Madeline, sister entombed alive, comes back and kills Roderick
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William Wilson
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Edgar Allan Poe, (Will I Am) William stabs William Wilson, actually stabs himself, double, twin, the self, gothic He
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Berenice
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Edgar Allan Poe, Egaeus and his cousin Berenice, intensely focused man, becomes fixated on Berenice's teeth, Berenice buried alive, Egaeus rips out her teeth
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Ligeia
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Edgar Allan Poe, narrator and wife Ligeia, wife dies, narrator marries Lady Rowena, Lady Rowena grows ill and dies, transformed into Ligeia
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The Black Cat
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Edgar Allan Poe, narrator blinds cat in fit of rage, hangs it, home catches on fire, imprint of cat on wall, finds cat with white patch on chest, tries to kill cat but wife interfers, kills wife, hides her in basement, cat gives him away to the police, "I had walled the monster up within the tomb!"
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Pomegranate Seed
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Edith Wharton, Persephone and Demeter
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Mr. Jones
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Edith Wharton, Lady Jane Lynke and the house of Bells, Mr. Jones presence (ethereal), Mrs. Clemm is strangled to death
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Kerfol
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Edith Wharton, narrators friend Lanrivain suggests he buy the house at Kerfol, finds a few dogs, Yves de Cornault (old owner of Kerfol) and wife Anne de Barrigan, "affair" with Herve de Lanrivain
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The Other Two
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Edith Wharton, Mr. Waythorn and Alice Waythorn, Alice's daughter Lily becomes ill causing them to cut short their honeymoon, Varick and Haskett are Alice's ex-husbands, she has a strange hold on them
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Afterward
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Edith Wharton, Mary and missing husband Ned, bought Lyng home looking for something haunted, Elwell (Blue Star Mine where Ned made his money)
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The Triumph of Night
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Edith Wharton, George Faxon trapped in a snowstorm while on way to a new job, Frank Rainer (nephew to Lavington) helps Faxon, Faxon begins a mental decline and sees ghost image of Lavington staring hatefully at Rainer, Rainer dies
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Turn of the Screw
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Henry James, Douglas reads a story to the narrator of a governess, Miles, Flora, and Mrs. Grose. Ghosts are Miss Jessel and Peter Quint
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grotesque
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comically or repulsively ugly or distorted, Latin root as "grotto", which originated from Greek krypte "hidden place", meaning a small cave or hollow
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uncanny
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strange or mysterious, esp. in an unsettling way, German: Das Unheimliche, "the opposite of what is familiar"
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he pronoun
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Gothic he, person is not clarified (gothic pronoun)
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incubus/succubus
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from the Latin verb, incubo, incubare, or "to lie upon", demon in male form who lies upon sleepers, especially women, in order to have sexual intercourse with them
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anima/animus
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unconscious feminine psychological qualities that a male possesses (anima) or the masculine ones possessed by the female (animus)
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usurper
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person who seizes and holds (the power or rights of another, for example) by force or without legal authority
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transport
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overwhelm (someone) with a strong emotion
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catastrophe
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an event causing great and often sudden damage or suffering; a disaster, from katastrephein to overturn
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doppelganger
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paranormal double of a living person
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red room
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Berenice where the narrator's mother dies, blood
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campy
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being so extreme that it has an amusing and perversely sophisticated appeal, amusing because it is obviously intended to be strange or shocking and seems to be ridiculing itself:
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parody
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imitative work created to mock, comment on or trivialize an original work, its subject, author, style, or some other target, by means of satiric or ironic imitation
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physiognomy
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a person's facial features or expression, esp. when regarded as indicative of character or ethnic origin.
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reprobation
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state of being to condemn strongly as unworthy, unacceptable, or evil
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anachronistic
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from the Greek ανά (ana: up, against, back, re-) and χρόνος (chronos: time), is a chronological inconsistency in some arrangement
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sentience
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ability to feel, perceive, or to experience subjectivity
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first-person narrative
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fallacy and occupying their minds
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commodious
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roomy and comfortable, convenient
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coverture
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legal doctrine whereby, upon marriage, a woman's legal rights and obligations were subsumed by those of her husband
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eponymous
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story bares name of character
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monster
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: a strange or horrible imaginary creature, something that is extremely or unusually large
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picturesque
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visually attractive, esp. in a quaint or pretty style.
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sublime
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of such excellence, grandeur, or beauty as to inspire great admiration or awe, elevate to a high degree of moral or spiritual purity or excellence
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Protection/predation
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Governess and Miles, Manfred and Isabella
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Projection
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the presentation of an image on a surface, esp. a movie screen.
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Allegory
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a story, poem, or picture that can be interpreted to reveal a hidden meaning, typically a moral or political one.
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Idiom (joking idioms)
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combination of words that has a figurative meaning owing to its common usage
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Possession
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Miles
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Synesthesia
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neurological phenomenon in which stimulation of one sensory or cognitive pathway leads to automatic, involuntary experiences in a second sensory or cognitive pathway
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Cliff hangers
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Turn of the Screw
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Monomania
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form of partial insanity conceived as single pathological preoccupation in an otherwise sound mind (Berenice)
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Necromancy
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form of magic involving communication with the deceased - either by summoning their spirit as an apparition or raising them bodily
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Mise enavyme
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sense of looking into the abyss, reflected repeatedly
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I/Thou
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intimate you
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Limminal
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something that's inbetween; along the borders
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Burlesque
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literary, dramatic or musical work intended to cause laughter by caricaturing the manner or spirit of serious works, or by ludicrous treatment of their subjects.
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Clap of Thunder
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heaven/gods saying no!
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Animal/children
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guilt
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Tale
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something told
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Northanger Abbey
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(Jane Austen) Catherine Morland (pursued by John Thorpe) and Henry Tilney (Catherine's actual interest), Isabella Thorpe (John's sister), James and Isabella become engaged (she flirts with Henry's older brother) Henry marries Catherine though she's poor
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The Castle of Otranto
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(Horace Walpole) Manfred and Hippolita, wants to marry Isabella, Theodore save her, son of the friar Jerome. Matilda (Manfred's daughter). Theodore badly wounds Isabella's father, Frederic. Frederic and Manfred agree to marry each others daughters. Manfred stabs Matilda, thinking she's Isabella.
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Uncanny
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"unheimlich" = unhomelike, strange and personal, familiar and hidden
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Yellow Wallpaper
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(Charlotte Perkins Gilman), narrator and her husband John, woman double in the wall
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Jolly Corner
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(Henry James), Spencer Brydon and Alice Staverton, double representing who he could have been if he'd been a businessman
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Terror
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expands and awakens the soul and faculties
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Horror
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contracts, freezes, and nearly annihilates the soul and the faculties, when evil is in the story
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Sublime
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terror, not horror
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Secularization
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the activity of changing something (art or education or society or morality etc.) so it is no longer under the control or influence of religion, makes belief optional
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Female Sensitive Theory
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women are more ethereal than men in a physical sense and a spiritual one
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Male Sensitive
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Spencer Brydon (Jolly Corner), becomes the one experiencing the ghosts, making contact with them
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The Yellow Wallpaper
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Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Jane and John, "temporary nervous depression - a slight hysterical tendency," psychosis, unreliable narrator
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Jolly Corner
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Henry James, Spencer Brydon, Alice Staverton, unsure if he made the right decisions in life, died and awoke in afterlife or awakes from being unconscious
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The Oval Portrait
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Edgar Allan Poe, eccentric painter paints his young wife, ignoring her, she dies while he finishes
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The Unknown Masterpiece
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Honoré de Balzac, Nicolas Poussin visits painter Porbus along with Frenhofer. Frenhofer admits his own painting, La Belle noiseuse, remains unfinished. Uses Gillete (Poussin's gf) as a model. Kills himself when the painting isn't up to par
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Loneliness
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Sherwood Anderson, Enoch Robinson, can't tolerate people beyond the imaginary ones in his head, imaginary people follow a woman in his complex out of Enoch's apartment, tells George Willard the tale
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GradeSaver (TM) ClassicNotes
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The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket
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Home
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The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket : Study Guide : The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket Summary
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The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket
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Edgar Allan Poe, Pym not wanting to tell story, Augustus Barnard teaches him sailing, sneaks aboard the Grampus and is left in the hull for several days while a mutiny happens, Dirk Peters (half-Native American), take back the ship and are lost at sea, eat a mutinier, Augustus dies, rescued by Captain Guy, meet indians (Too-wit), Peters and Pym survive attack by natives, steal canoe and hostage, ends as they reach a huge white figure
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The Raft Passage
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Mark Twain, left out of Huckleberry Finn
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A Rose For Emily
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William Faulkner, funeral of Emily Grierson and Homer, cousins come and interfere, "hereditary obligation" for the town to just deal with her, Homer's dead body is found in her room after she dies, Emily becomes more and more sculptural, shifting perspective
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The Lottery
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Shirley Jackson, In the first round of the lottery, the head of each family draws a small slip of paper from a black box; Bill Hutchinson gets the one slip with a black spot, meaning that his family has been chosen. In the next round, each Hutchinson family member draws a slip, and Bill's wife Tessie gets the marked slip. In keeping with tradition, each villager obtains a stone and begins to surround Tessie. The story ends as Tessie is stoned to death while she bemoans the unfairness of the situation.
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Shaman
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Hong Kingston, from The Woman Warrior, Brave Orchid studies medicine and then returns to her Chinese village where she's praised as a killer of ghosts, teaches daughter that all white people are ghosts, blending of the animal and the human
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The Mark of the Beast
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Rudyard Kipling, Fleete goes to India, desecrates Hanuman statue by stopping a cigarette on the statues forehead, is bitten by a priest and begins to act like he has rabies, friends force the priest to remove the spirit, Fleete remembers nothing
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The Diary of Mr. Poynter
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M.R. James, "Mr James Denton, M.A., F.S.A., etc., etc.," comes across a local diary from a Mr. Poynter, A fabric sample fallen out of an old diary seems like "just the thing" for some new curtains and inspires a man to have the pattern reproduced-- but there's something sinister in those sinuous lines, "what he had been touching" — not the dog, but a man-shaped figure on all fours covered with hair — "rose to meet him".
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Huck Finn Passage
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Homoeroticism, feminization, unreliable narrators, tale within a tale, threat of domesticity, being buried alive/pregnancy.
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Amanuensis
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a writers assistant who documents their speaking, Found in frame narrative, AGP (Poe writing from the perspective of a guy who is Poe telling Mr. P what to write)
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Polymorphous perversity
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a skewing of gender and sexual desires, character without well-defined gender or sexual boundaries, Multifaceted, multi-layered definition of desire (AGP, Berenice, Huck Finn)
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Oceanic infancy
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suggests lack of boundaries, return to the womb, no distinctions between self and other (AGP)
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Cannibalism
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AGP
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Male Pregnancy
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AGP, "drinking the muddy Mississippi" "baby in the barrel" -literal embodiment of pregnancy
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ekphrasis
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"translating" the art on the wall in to writing, when people are being dicks about art
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palimpsest
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"Yellow Wallpaper,"a manuscript or piece of writing material on which the original writing has been effaced to make room for later writing but of which traces remain.
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Frame Narrative
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The frame story leads readers from a first story into another, smaller one (or several ones) within it, AGP
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secularization
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move from religion to nonreligious
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allegory
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a story, poem, or picture that can be interpreted to reveal a hidden meaning, typically a moral or political one
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Sanguinity
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AGP, the ship of the dead, the gulls eating the dead bodies, AGP's desire to eat the dead bodies, red room
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Animus
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an inner masculine part of the female personality in the analytic psychology of C. G. Jung
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Gender Construction
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Jolly Corner, Fall of the House of Usher, William Wilson, Black Cat
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Picturesque
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connotative of beauty, over realistic, tableau, structured, not symmetrical necessarily, FOTHOU
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Mimesis
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aesthetic term in relation to the representation of reality, realistically, Desire something from seeing someone else's desire of it
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Female Sensitive
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Yellow Wallpaper, Jolly Corner
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Revenant
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a person who has returned, esp. supposedly from the dead. (Madeline FOTHOU, Ligeia, Oval Portrait)
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Orphan
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Turn of the Screw, Fall of the House of Usher, Huck Finn
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Mis-en-abyme
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set in the abyss, two mirrors, sublime
