Section B Questions

Section B Questions

The section B question that we focused the lesson on was:

“Writers often use the Gothic literary genre in order to challenge or destabilise the beliefs and conventions of society” Discuss this statement in relation to three texts.

 We began to talk about how we could interpret this question. We said how it could be related to Julian Wolfrey’s article in which he said "Gothic exists in relation to mainstream culture in the same way as a parasite does to its host". We discussed how this related to the word ‘Destabilise’ in the question. Wolfrey’s says that the Gothic acts much like a parasite which feeds on the ‘deep wounds’ of society in order to evoke fear and anxiety from readers. In other words the Gothic seeks to reveal to society its own fears. It aims to morph these fears into the traditional stock characters and wild, isolated settings of the Gothic in order to illuminate society’s own fears to itself, thus destabilising ‘the beliefs and conventions of society’.

Following this we split up into groups of three and was each given an article relating to a specific text. We then had to extract quotes from these articles and find quotes within the text that we could relate to these. My specific text was ‘The Bloody Chamber’ and a quote that we picked out was:

“Otherness takes centre stage”  - in discussion to this quote by Fred Botting we talked about how, in The Bloody Chamber ‘Otherness’ does indeed take centre stage. Carter does not stick to the traditional ‘methods’ of the gothic. The stock manly, boisterous characters typical of the Gothic are replaced with noble heroines who are often in a position of power over their male counterparts. In relation to The Bloody Chamber itself we talked about the shifts in power within Carter’s stories. One of many examples is in ‘The Erl-King’ in which we see our female narrator strangle the Erl-King with his own hair while he lays in her lap.

Finally with all of our quotes and critics points we began to link the general ideas of our quotes to all three texts rather than just one. To do this we constructed a ven diagram in order to demonstrate clearly which points linked to which text and whether any points would be relevant for all three texts. Some examples of the quotes from my groups ven diagram are linked to below:

(Very simplified but you get the idea)

Ven Diagram