HL students please don’t forget to return permission slips in tomorrow’s lesson for the theatre trip. You don’t need to pay at this point, I just need confirmation that we are attending. 

Thanks,

Ms.Aoife

Henry Fuseli (1741–1825), The Nightmare (1781), oil on canvas, 101.6 × 127 cm, Detroit Institute of Arts, Detroit, MI. Wikimedia Commons.

Fuseli’s famous painting “The Nightmare” (1781) is said to have inspired the writing of both Shelley’s Frankenstein and Poe’s The Fall of the House of Usher (both texts we will study as part of our Gothic fiction unit!)

Comment below with your initial response to Fuseli’s painting.

What dominates the image?

What kind of atmosphere is created? What kind of emotions could it evoke in a viewer?

Looking down at her body, and the pool of blood she lay in, I laughed to myself. It was almost obscene, in a way, that we would end up here. I ran my hand through her dark hair, felt it slick with something that wasn’t water. The knife sat on the ground, by my foot. But then again, all flowers fade and die; daisies rot and wither like any other.

It was a summer, then, when we first met, and the warm wind danced through the grass. Spring’s flowers no longer held themselves tall; but the daisies stood firm and straight. And there she was.

It was a ball; a summer ball at the university, and there was singing inside the hall. Someone was shouting, a few too many beers in, and I was standing outside, away from it all. After all, they weren’t like me. The only voices they heard were each others’.

And there she was; a smile on her lips and my hand in hers. Telling me everything would be alright. My dear, my love, my flower.

And soon, she’ll be pushing up daisies.

Our extract (pg 114-115) was a conversation between Henry Tilney and Catherine, about their upcoming visit to Northanger Abbey. Catherine’s pretty much going on about how she thinks Northanger Abbey is going to be exactly like all all the abbeys she’s read in her gothic fiction novels. Henry just pretends to go along with it, in a mocking manner. He exaggerates about all the horrifying elements of his home like secret passages, dim-lighted hallways, creepy furniture and creepy servants. It turns out there are actually a lot of intertextual references to The Mysteries of Udolpho, in what Henry was saying. Catherine doesn’t really seem to pick up on the fact that Henry is making fun of her rampant imagination. Which is strange because she’s read The Mysteries of Udolpho and doesn’t seem to realise that he’s just stating things from that book. She even keeps telling Henry to continue about the house, until he can’t because he’s just laughing too much. This is how Northanger Abbey can be viewed as a satire based novel, it just pokes fun at lots of tropes that are considered classic gothic fiction.

I found a book that compares Northanger Abbey and other real gothic novels (it is called Corpus Linguistics in Literary Analysis: Jane Austen and Her Contemporaries). And they compare every gothic scene in Northanger Abbey to other genuine gothic novels like Mysteries of Udolpho and The Monk. I decided to focus on the motif of a candle being blown out because it is so typical and I personally have seen it countless times in modern terror and no doubt it happens in the classics as well just as often as it happens today. It is also a clear motif in my passage.

For example in ‘The Turn of the Screw’ (gothic ghost story) a governess walks into a room and the candle suddenly goes out. This novel was published after Northanger Abbey, but we can still see the classic cliche being used seriously.

In Mysteries of Udolpho it also has a similar scene however it is not quite the same. The main character, Emily, considers getting herself a candle make her feel safer but she is too scared to leave her room to do so.

This is not specifically part of my passage however I thought it was so cool that I made this connection. In Northanger Abbey, the housekeeper tells Catherine that a cousin of the family died in the room Catherine in staying in. When I read this I immediately made the connection to last year when we were reading the infamous (to our grade) novel by Susan Hill, “I’m the King of the Castle”. I just remembered the moment when Hooper tells Kingshaw his grandfather died in the room where Kingshaw is sleeping. And guess what: IT IS A GOTHIC NOVEL. I was literally so excited when I was able to find a clear gothic motifs in other gothic works I have studied other than the gothic pieces we looked at this year.