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LECTURE NOTES Sardonicus     

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One of the most famous writers of horror: Stephan King o Sardonicus : Modern Gothic ever written Posted in 1971: in a playboy magazine Assigned to medical horror sub genre The story is narrated by Sir Robert Cargrave, a Harley Street Physician who has made a name for himself by his research into treating muscular paralysis He receives an unexpected letter from a young woman he idolized seven years ago, Maude Randall, who vanished from London society after her parents suddenly lost the family fortune and died in disgrace It seems Maud has married a Central European nobleman named Sardonicus, and is inviting Cargrave to come visit them in their castle in Bohemia

pp.438-440 How does the setting compare to other gothic tales examined? How does it function within the tale?  Haunted castle: gothic trope o Intimidating, dark, spooky o Similar to Dracula o Idea of having a bared entrance and control over who comes in and who doesn’t  Openly anti-romanticism o Being a short story: no room to be highly descriptive o Piece on landscape  Orientalism o servants are Slavic - demonised o Characterised by not fitting into society - not knowing English etc  Setting o Sets up character and dynamic o Mysterious o Questioning character o Issues before the story even began  Doesn’t fit in with how their society looks  Similar description of travel to that of Dracula, lots of trains, a trip far from smooth, the country being wild and raw and the protagonist overwhelmed with fatigue and discomfort  There wasn't as much of an exploration of the Sublime as Radcliffe, but the castle certainly reflects that of Dracula's  The furniture inside: similar to the house of usher  The characters that sprawl through Haunted Castles are frightful to the core: the heartless monster holding two lovers in limbo; the beautiful dame journeying down a damned road toward depravity (with the help of an evil gypsy); the man who must wear his fatal crimes on his face in the form of an awful smile  Engrossing, grotesque, and completely entrancing, Russell’s Gothic tales are the best kind of dreadful  

p.441; 452-453; 456-457 How is Maude described? What forms of entrapment does she experience? Looks good on the outside and on the insight she's crushed (due to the isolation)

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She seemed young and healthy, and while she used to be happy she was now sad, which he assumes is because of her entrapment She seems super out of the loop from the London lifestyle and she is sad about missing out on things like the Opera She seems to truly care for her husbands well-being, begging the doctor to cure him, though she then notes that if he doesn't succeed Sardonicus will kill her She was essentially the bait to get the doctor to the castle She says her fate is in his hands, and tells him not to fail He then goes to confront Sardonicus about it but she says not to pp.442-443 Describe Sardonicus as a Gothic Villain? How is he similar/different to other Gothic Villains? Identify the features which make him an effective Gothic figure? To what extent does he embody societal fears? pp.445-450 Discuss the role of Sardonicus’ story? In what way does it impact upon the readers’ perception of Sardonicus, either positively or negatively? pp.455-456 Sardonicus threatens Maude’s health/life pp.461-462 Sardonicus’ successful treatment pp.463-465 What do you make of the story’s conclusion? Is it effective? Why or why not? What does it suggest about the concerns of the Gothic genre more broadly?

The lady of the house of love  How does Carter challenge the representations in this story  Carter: focus on gender relations (one of main preoccupations)  Females: irrational, subservient  All mythic versions of women: consolatory nonsciences o Used to pacify women  Women have been trapped by architypes, gender roles  Patriarchy  Carter explores: o How does she go about challenging notions  "She is so beautiful that it is unnatural"

TUTORIAL NOTES Secret Observations on the Goat-Girl  Liminality in the character  Liminality of the setting  Edge of the property  There is a sense of the liminal and secrets  Children aren't allowed to know o Heart of the authors concerns o Even in the title  Author: psychological realism  Mode to depict mental states of her characters  Unseeable dimensions  Modernist  Didn’t want to depict realism in the way the artists saw too - wanted to capture inner reality  Realism: impression of recordings reflecting an actual way of life (DOES NOT APPLY TO THIS STORY) o Oates: Inner - psychological

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Psychological realism: central consciousness o Involvement of story: worth of central otherness

Narrators reliability  Innocent eyes and curiosity  Is this goat-girl a projection  Creator: source of fear o No name or family o Forbidden object - children are not supposed to know  Uncanny creator: familiar and unfamiliar Gothic Effect and Chronotope  Gothic effect to be attained: tale should combine fearful sense of inheritance in time with a + Claustrophobic sense of enclosure in space, these two dimensions reinforcing one another to produce an impression of sickening descent into disintegration            

Gothic chronotope: use of time and space in the gothic When time and space becomes distorted - reality becomes distorted Linear sense of time and ground ourselves to a space Relates to Dracula: doesn’t know where he's going Time continues to come less trustworthy - loosing bearings Destabilising effect of reality Present times: COVID impacted our movement in space (lucky here but not in Melbourne etc) Goat-girl doesn’t age but the narrator does Claustrophobic: truth will eventually be revealed Sense of psychological instability Narrator questions - and in a childish way she says she must have been mistaken When I was 9 years old - thought she would grow along with me o Produce terror and uncertainty o No named characters, dialogue, no age o No physical thing to hold onto for time and space o Sense of her being younger - we don't know her age now o Don’t know how much time has passed

Does it convey psychological realism  Sense that her story (with all these silences - things we don't know of the goat girl) o Shows a lack of the narrators knowledge  Secrets that we cannot know  "Though we children are forbidden to know about her"  Like the women in the gothic: occupies upper room  Sense of guilt on her behalf - childhood innocence o Wants siblings to know her name etc o Doesn’t want her to be excluded  Children live on the edge of knowledge - like the goat girl  Liminality  Trying to show a different form of realism

NOTES The Lady of the House of Love and The Secret Observations on the Goat Girl

Troubling and troublesome interpretations “The Gothic in Western Culture” in J. E. Hogle (*ed.) The Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction. CUP: Cambridge, 2002. Article Summary  Gothic fiction: entirely post-medieval and even post-renaissance phenomenon  Despite several long-standing literary forms combined in its initial rendering: the first publication of "A Gothic Story" was a counterfeit medieval tale published before the Middle Ages The secret observations on the Goat Girl  “Secret Observations on the Goat-Girl,” a seemingly marvellous creature lives on the outskirts of a family farm.  Story: packed with words and in depth descriptions  Goat-Girl: description is the gothic portion of the story o Otherwise: it is a 'sweet story'  Family lives near Goat-Girl: has nine children o The older children hate Goat-Girl - gives them nightmares and want father to butcher her o Father is not strong enough to order death of the creature  Shows father's compassion o Youngest girl: shows compassion for the young Goat-Girl (even tries to include her - birthday cake)  Girl watched GG everyday - thinks she is wonderful and happy (makes the girl happy)  Contrast between siblings (others: think she is blind and hideous and they should kill it)  Imagines creature as her sister + names it Astrid  Points to possibility that a new child was expected in the family around the time of its arrival Psychoanalytical reading of the text:  The deformed goat may be read as a symbol of a human birth tragedy (miscarriage, still birth, birth defects) of which the children have not been informed, leaving them with the unique coping strategy of projecting their feelings of fear onto the unusual farm creature "Don't judging a book by its cover"  GG: not the villain that we expect her to be and the real source of danger is within our minds  Goat-Girl's description o "The veins of her eyes glow a faint warm pulsing pink and the irises are animal slits, vertical, very black" (498)

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General description is scary and imagining a half-girl half-goat sends a shiver down the reader's spine Descriptions of her actions: do not match terrifying look "sometime she grazes" "you should see how delightful she is, playing in the meadow, trotting and frisking about" (499)  She is non threatening She is a source of fear: no name and no known family or origins  Forbidden object of which the children are not supposed to know  It is frightening in its abnormality  Uncanny creature is composed of a mixture of goat and human features  Sounds: neither human speech nor as a goat noise  Creature’s arrival at the outskirts of the family property: coincide with mental and physical decline in the mother who “rarely comes downstairs now,” has stopped dressing and doing her hair, no longer embraces her children, + acquired a “faint and shrill” laugh Oats: enjoys creating stories that allow for the possibility of multiple interpretations Close look at the tale: reveals a very common theme for Oates  Children who are deliberately left in the dark about a family secret

The juxtaposition of highly realistic passages with others that much more resemble flights of fancy is an important characteristic of Oates’s fiction However: it's not one that has been consistently accepted and understood Readers have been disconcerted by the structure and language of long Oates novels

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this story seems to show, breeds fear and further horrors as the creature, of which the children have accentuated its human characteristics, is destined for the butcher’s block

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Her depiction of the terrifying, grotesque farm creature that symbolizes both the fear of unknown origins and the terror of unspoken family tragedy corresponds well to editor Chris Baldick’s explanation of the Gothic effect

The Lady of the House of Love Summary  In an abandoned village in Transylvania, Romania, is an old chateau, and in it lives a Countess, the “beautiful queen of vampires”  She is a young girl in an old wedding dress, and she cannot help her bloodthirsty desires, though she hates them

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She spends her hours laying out Tarot cards and reading her own inevitable fate, or else strumming the bars of her pet lark’s cage The house is dark, overgrown, and haunted by ghosts

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The story begins in an unknown area of Romanian in a abandoned village on the eve of the First World War, where the Countess, "queen of the vampires," lives. Ghosts live with her in the castle, but she keeps herself alone in a dusty, rotting and lightless suite She wears her dead mother's bridal gown as though it is a uniform Her only company is a caged lark The Countess likes the lark's song because "she likes to hear it announce how it cannot escape." o Similar to herself, which highlights her isolation and entrapment

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Constantly shifting tense Possible to give the impression the narrator is lost in time Male is unlike any other in the collection of stories; he is innocent o He takes on a parenting role- kissing her finger better and putting her to bed- as opposed to seducing her. Reversal in the story "her beauty is a symptom of her disorder, of her soullessness." o Because it has no flaw, her face is as falsely human as the mask o Only when she has transformed and consequently died does her face look "far older, less beautiful and so, for the first time, fully human." o The reversal at the story's end confirms one last time that love cannot survive in the Countess's sleepwalking world of torment A lack of sexual understanding and experience is a weakness o For the soldier, virginity and sexual naiveté are sources of strength o The narrator explains, "he is immune to shadow, due to his virginity" and, "he has the special quality of virginity, most and least ambiguous of states; ignorance, yet at the same time, power in potentia, and, furthermore, unknowingness, which is not the same as ignorance. He is more than he knows." o According to the narrator, the soldier' sexual and transformative power is so great precisely because it is untapped

Gothic characters  Countess o

Described with physical attributes of a typical Gothic femme-fatal or monster  She has the personality traits of a victim o Described as being so beautiful she is unnatural  Beauty: deformity - she is a victim in her own body o Only company: caged bird (symbolic of her)

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Forever locked in her castle and unable to escape and takes delight in torturing the creature in order to make herself feel wanted o Trapped through her vampirism: described using the typical Gothic animalistic elements of a monster...