...Enl 200 Oct. 16, 2014 Compare and contrast the theme of sexuality in three of the texts we’ve read so far. In several texts we have read in class so far there has been hidden meanings and in order to figure out these meanings we've had to analyze the context of the texts. One of the hidden themes we have found in several texts is that of sexuality. In the texts where it has been seen the most is that of the novel Dracula and in two Edgar Allen Poe poems, such as, "Annabel Lee" and "The Sleeper". These all have clear themes of sexuality in each though some parts are different, however, they all have similar traits. These three texts are alike not just because they have the theme of sexuality but they all deal with the death of a lady and how the main characters of these texts are attracted to their death which is preceived as uncanny. In the book Dracula by Bram Stoker Dracula is a vampire who finds a victim named Lucy who he sucks her blood until she dies when Lucy is dead she is still seen as beautiful by the characters and are all still in love with her although she is dead. In the poem "Annabel Lee" the character's love Annabel has died but he is still attracted to her and talks about her as if she is still alive and lays with her every night. The next poem "The Sleeper" is similiar to "Annabel Lee" because the main character has lost the love of his life a beautiful woman. The character like in "Annabel Lee" struggles to deal with the nature of life and death. The...
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...4, 2015 The Transformation of Vampires: from Dracula to Twilight American Gothic is a subgenre of gothic fiction, with elements specific to it such as; rational versus irrational, Das Unheimliche, puritanism, and guilt just to name a few. What really distinguished American Gothic from any other form of gothic fiction is the continuous references to predestination and presence of original sin, simply because the puritans were the first to settle in the new colonies therefore having a profound influence on American gothic writers. However, American Gothic has become much more contemporary beginning in the eighteenth century. In Caroline Spooner’s “Contemporary Gothic”, she explains how gothic has been able to survive in America by “drawing self-referentially on itself, combining sincere nostalgia with a self-aware sense of theatre, even camp.” (Farkas 1). Gothic has the ability to transform depending on the the times and what social issues are prevalent at a specific time period. Many writers are taking it upon themselves to rewrite “the vampire” in a more modern setting. The face of a vampire has changed since Bram Stoker's Dracula, but his novel has influenced our society and will continue to influence our culture as time goes by. Some of Dracula’s characteristics, including his sensitivity to light and thirst for blood, are still present, but have just been tweaked to the writer’s preference. In the time of Dracula, the vampire was more of a villain but in many of...
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...Weird sisters are seen in many novels, but two famous ones about three supernaturally evil sisters are Dracula and Macbeth. Bram Stoker’s Dracula is about an old vampire coming to London and some vampire hunters trying to track him down. After he kills someone they love, and turns her into a vampire, the hunters realize what is going on, and to try to save their precious woman, Mina, they go on a journey. Their journey is to rid the world of Count Dracula and his vampire girls. Dracula’s vampire girls are three sisters in the book seen in Dracula’s castle. Shakespeare’s Macbeth is about a Thane who gets greedy, and kills to get, and keep the throne. The play then shows and focuses on his guilt from those deeds. During the play, Macbeth becomes fascinated with three witch sisters seen in the beginning by him and Banquo. In...
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...Ledger and Luckhurst (2000) further state that this was an ambivalent period; with major progress in science and technology but also a time of real decline, in which Britain’s global economic power was rivalled by Germany and America. This ambivalence at the turn of the century created fears and anxieties concerning the decline of the British race. A crucial influence on British anxieties of decline was underpinned by scientific and medical knowledge known as Theories of Degeneration. Ledger and Luckhurst (2000) state, at this time, that ‘…degeneration was one defining structure which can be traced across many disciplines…’[3] These theories of degeneration impacted over many discourses within Victorian culture including race, class, sexuality and morality, and envisaged ‘…a “primitive” lost world or degenerate “after world”.’[4] In other words, the threat of decline and degeneration to the upper middle class white race of Britain that held power both nationally and globally. Edward Tylor’s work, Primitive Culture asserted scientific naturalism and development along evolutionary lines ‘…races could...
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...The Art of Deception in Dracula "Be not deceived with the first appearance of things, for show is not substance" (English Proverb). Abraham Stoker, the author of Dracula, initially presents Count Dracula as a man of nobility, moral decency, and kindness. However, as Jonathan Harker learns more about Dracula, he discovers the otherworldliness, deceptiveness, and cruel intentions of Dracula. Stoker illustrates the Count in this manner to remove the disguise of the Victorian era. From 1837 to 1901, the people of London, England cloaked themselves with wealth, peace, and confidence through their expansions of land and population. However, Londoners were corrupt with their expectations of gender and society, while their city was grimy and impoverished....
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...<body Stoker also had a personal relationship to several third identities. As an Anglo-Irishman, he often proved to be too Irish to be truly English, yet too English to be merely Irish. This lack of an easy national identity is mirrored, as we shall see, in Stoker's own sexuality. It is difficult to label him as simply heterosexual or homosexual; at the very least, Stoker, like Harker, can be said to participate in a homoerotic lifestyle. Finally, and perhaps most influentially, Stoker saw a new definition of homosexuality based around the idea of a thirdspace become popular in the aftermath of his friend Oscar Wilde's trial and conviction in 1895. </body From <http://journals.sfu.ca/thirdspace/index.php/journal/article/viewArticle/olson/66> <body Transylvania is also a site of gender inversion for Harker. Throughout his stay at the castle Harker is feminized. Dracula takes Harker's possessions from him, doling out food, money, and correspondence as he determines Harker needs it. Dracula also controls Harker's movements around the grounds and his access to the entrances and exits of the castle. Harker also notes his feminisation in his journal. He notices that he writes his journal, "sitting at a little old oak table where in old times possibly some fair lady sat to pen" (36), and sleeps "where of old ladies had sat and sung and lived sweet lives whilst their gentle breasts were sad for their menfolk away in the midst of remorseless wars" (37). This...
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...“The role of women in the gothic genre is as victims, always subject to male authority.” Compare and contrast the extent to which this interpretation is relevant to your three chosen texts. “The wolf consumes red riding hood – what else can you expect if you talk to strange men, comments Perrault briskly. Let’s not bother our heads with the mysteries of sadomasochistic attraction” Angela Carter; Foreword to Perrault’s Short Stories. In much of today’s feminist writings, the Gothic era is frequently defined as a period in which the oppression of females was at its most intense. In response to fin de siècle anxieties of a social revolution in which gender stereotypes could be overhauled, gothic writers, it is claimed, sought to reassert cultural and gender norms – a reassertion which inevitably resulted in the oppression of women. In view of such contemporary analysis, it is thus all too tempting to offer a sweeping judgement of gothic literature as victimising, oppressive and misogynistic; Dracula’s “victims” are all “unambiguously women[1]”, Poe victimises through an “idealised and dehumanising image of women[2]”, while Carter is a “pseudo feminist” who merely “reinforces patriarchal views” with her “pornographic” writing[3]. Yet such views are largely artificial, and are primarily based on potted summaries of the above works, rather than a closer textual analysis. If one takes the definition of a victim as a being who is subject to the successful predatory actions of...
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...far you would agree with this view.” Women are central to the narrative of Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber, Bram Stoker’s Dracula and within Christina Rossetti’s poetry. All three texts were written during significant times in history: Rossetti and Stoker’s works during the infamous reign of Queen Victoria, and Carter’s collection during the year Margaret Thatcher became the first female prime minister of Britain. As a genre, the gothic is often regarded as being dominated by men, with women featuring in the role of victim subject to patriarchy. Many early gothic texts feature women in the role of victim under the authority of predatory men, perhaps most notably in Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto and Matthew Lewis’ The Monk. However, Stoker, Rossetti and Carter all at times break with this convention by characterising some of their females as strong, independent and liberated. As writers, they experiment with the characteristic features of the gothic genre, particularly Carter and Rossetti who challenge the traditional conceptions by presenting many of their female characters in dominant, authoritative roles which break convention. There are occasions in all three texts when the passivity traditionally associated with femininity in the gothic genre can be perceived to be a direct result of oppression from patriarchal figures. In Dracula, Stoker uses a quintessentially gothic scene to portray Lucy being preyed upon by the Count: “The window blind blew back with...
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...nineteenth Europe. Works written in this time focused on the representation of fear in the face of dissolution of traditional structures, gender roles and religion. The resurgence of vampire fiction in the late twentieth century presents a different image of the vampire figure, appropriate to the changing societal values and nature of our world. Bram Stokers novel “Dracula” (1897) is compared to the Catherine Hardwicke’s film “Twilight” (2008) to display the development of conventional archetypes and tropes of the vampire into a more contemporary context....
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...Do the monsters and the victims in horror films have any connection to contemporary social issues? Answer with reference to one or two horror films of your choice. Name: Leopold Riess Course: IR 140 Global Communications, Citizens and Cultural Politics Word Length: 1902 Story telling is an art that has been part of the human civilizations since time immemorial. In the different parts of the world, be it in Africa, the Caribbean or the European nations, the early human societies would use narrations for a variety of purposes such as entertainment, passing time or more importantly to communicate the values, traditions and principles that governed the specific society (Tudor, 1997). With the emergence of different religious schools of thought, narrations and later film work developed an inclination towards the depiction of evil versus good. The descriptions of the horrific nature of hell and the terrible demons there in was meant to scare shaky religious affiliates from deserting their faith. Since then the development of the horror film genre has advanced. According to Hogan (n.d) the first ever horror film to be produced in America was Frankenstein by Thomas Edison. In the contemporary day, the production of horror movies has been exaggerated with hard headed teenagers being the most preferred characters. As a matter of fact, some horror movies such as Friday the 13th and Freddy Vs Jackson were so popular that they made 234.6 and 224.8 million US dollars respectively...
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...Dracula on season 5 the author presents Buffy and her friend Willow as the heroes of the episode who save the world at the end of the day. Buffy’s as well as Willow’s characters embody many different types of female power in this episode. Buffy represents physical strength, as she often uses her own body as a powerful weapon. In beginning of the episode, Buffy in the middle of the night, leaves her bed and goes to the cemetery to kill a vampire and is able to come back home and sleep comfortably because she did her job. In this scene the director presents Buffy as the hero who goes at night to save the world. Willow, Buffy’s best friend and the witch, embodies mental power. She is represented as the technology expert and science whiz, however, throughout...
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...For the assignment, I watched the Blaxploitation film “Blacula”. According the Wikipedia the movie is a parody of Dracula (which I have never seen). The majority of the cast are African Americans, with a few minor roles played by white people. In the beginning of the film, Count Dracula (a white guy) supported the slave trade (this movie is from the early 70s). Mamuwalde, aka Blacula, is against the slave trade, and in the beginning of the movie, and ending the slave trade is very important to him. But then, Count Dracula turns him into a vampire. Once he is awoken, 150 years later, he is now a vampire. Instead of being concerned with the slave trade, he now is only concerned with a woman. At first, I was having a hard time understanding...
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...The Diversity of the Mythological Creature Vampire Through Time and History It’s been a hundred years since Bram Stoker’s Dracula, and the vampire and its tales have swept the world in a whirlwind craze. Since, there has always been a fascination with the mystery of a vampire. Someone wearing plastic fangs, a cape, and black evening clothes will instantly remind you of the mythological creature. The much feared creature is and was portrayed in a number of ways. In the early days when they were just folklore, vampires were blood sucking predators and feared pale stalkers. In Vampire God: the Allure of the Dead in the Western Culture (2009), discussing the popularity of vampires in society, Mary Y. Hallab says that the folklore vampire is constantly compared to the other supernatural beings like witches and werewolf’s, and today’s concept is also a confused being, a zombie? A lover? Hallab states that “vampires are only those figures—folkloric, mythical, or literary—who are dead humans who are still capable of behaving as though they are alive.” Today, vampires have become a culture of their own, and are a huge part of mainstream pop culture. The Twilight Cullen’s and Sesame Street’s Count Dracula have a whole new appeal on adults and children. The appeal is not always good. According to Vampire Gothic, which is about vampire gothic cultures in United States, Teresa A. Goddu discusses a teenage vampire clan that was discovered in Murray, Kentucky, that was found...
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...Today’s modern day vampire is considered one of the most notorious and iconic figures all over the world. With the steady stream of vampire novels, films, and television shows being produced, it is fair to say that the vampire has become the dark horse of literature, every enthusiasts dream. Yet this wasn’t always the case, because vampires were once considered the stuff of nightmares. Every culture has stories of these once terrifying ‘bloodsucking demons’ that, according to literary historian Brian Frost, “may go back to prehistoric times”. However, many of the myths surrounding such creatures emerged mainly during the 18th century particularly arising in Eastern Europe in areas such as Serbia, Roma, and Slovakia. The major paradigm shift from the early 19th century to the early 21st century is a complete change in attitude and definition of a vampire from a terrifying creature of the night to a romantic and beautiful almost-human, resulting from a change in religious and societal beliefs. These myths sparked a mass hysteria throughout most the 18th century, with frequent reported sightings of alleged vampires. Most famous of which was the case of Serbian peasant Arnold Paole who is believed to be the first man accused of being a vampire (Marx). It was supposed he had killed 17 people from his village during the night, later returning to his coffin. Government officials who ordered his coffin to be opened believed at the time the body (which looked perfectly fine apart from...
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...Patrick McCormick, in his article “Why Monsters Have Become Alien to Us” originally appearing in the Christianity magazine, U.S. Catholic (1996), argues that monsters, especially in modern movies, are simply a representation of humans and our disconnection to needy individuals in the real world. McCormick supports his argument by comparing classic monster tales with characters of a certain depth and humanity, such as Count Dracula and Frankenstein’s monster, that grabs at the compassionate hearts of audiences to contemporary films that often include a united human race defeating alien-like monsters without hesitation. The purpose of McCormick’s essay is to show how most people treat monsters, no matter how they were created or place themselves in this world, in order to answer the question of whether monsters reside within us. Given the article's location in a sophisticated magazine, McCormick aims this essay at an educated audience interested in the human need to destroy, rather than accept, monsters. 1. There are many reasons why monster stories have endured popularity over the years. One reason McCormick points out is the action and adrenaline associated with modern movies. He claims that these movies tend to be designed for theme park rides and video games since they are all about the fight or flight response that adrenaline. The contemporary...
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