Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
skip to main |
skip to sidebar
This blog is for use by students in Anjuli Raza Kolb's "Legacies of the Gothic Novel" course at Columbia University.
Course Description
The gothic novel is a genre of 18th and 19th century fiction that concerns itself with fear, mystery, the supernatural, violence, purity, otherness, and the impact of these conceits on its largely female protagonists. Much maligned as a popular or 'low' genre at its inception, the form has nevertheless persisted in its popularity as well as crossed into 'higher' forms of modernism and postmodernism. This course will read three key texts in the gothic mode-Frankenstein, Jane Eyre, and Wuthering Heights-and follow the ways they are revisited and rewritten by contemporary American and Caribbean novelists. We will look at how these texts subvert the realist leanings of 18th century narrative prose in English-and its assumptions of enlightenment rationalism-by way of two main processes: narrative hypertrophy and feminist versions of horror. Additionally, we will take up select contemporary criticism on the gothic in literature, film, and art.
There are no prerequisites.
Followers
Blog Archive
-
▼
2009
(20)
-
▼
June
(15)
- Guerillas/No Telephone to Heaven
- Guerillas II
- Guerillas
- Sylvia Plath reads Purdah
- Wuthering Heights III
- Wuthering Heights II/Sedgwick/Kristeva
- Wuthering Heights I
- Wide Sargasso Sea II/ Caribbean Gothic
- Wide Sargasso Sea
- Jane Eyre II
- The Other Side of A Mirror
- Jane Eyre I
- Beloved III/ Modern Medea/ Black Frankenstein
- Beloved II
- Whitman "A Boston Ballad"
-
▼
June
(15)
“I won’t tell you that I scarcely listened to your stories. I was longing for night and darkness and the time when the moonflowers open” (152).
ReplyDeleteAntoinette is a decisively sensual woman. Especially, when compared to Jane Eyre. I wonder if that is what Rochester has come to hate so much. She is too wild, too eccentric, and too much alive for him. Also having learned to suppress his feelings at the age of five Rochester must feel extremely uncomfortable at the sight of such explosive feelings and longing for love. It is almost like there are two sides to him: one – thirsty for Antoinette with her secrets and magic; and the other – resentful of his own instincts and hating her for stirring something in him he did not know exists. I wonder if he is so eager to uproot her and bring her to England because he will finally feel himself on familiar grounds and it will be easier for him to digest her and put her behind. He could have left her in the West Indies, carefully guarded in some secluded place, just like Mason did with Antoinette’s mother…
As a child, Antoinette Cosway thinks about the convent, the matriarchal bubble in the patriarchal society. She wonders why they never pray for happiness. When she and Mr. Rochester arrive at their house after their wedding and journey, they drink a toast with two tumblers of rum punch. Antoinette insists that they toast, "to happiness." Does she even know what this means? What is Antoinette's definition of happiness? Why does happiness elude her? When is she happy and what happens to those moments of happiness? Is she ever truly happy or are there moments when she just believes she might be?
ReplyDeleteI would like to respond to Olga's post. It impressed upon me as well that Rochester seemed very duplicitous in his attitude towards his new bride. He lusts for her, and lusts to destruct her as well. His feelings seem to be so extreme: when he lusts, he lusts we fervor, and when the lust is expired, Rochester is just as determined, it seems, to deny Antoinette any leniency and to destruct her entirely. At first, his extreme emotions troubled me. What is the meaning of his tryst with Amelie? It is so devastation, so directly hurtful, so…monstrous in nature. Its as if Rochester becomes the monster Frankenstein in this foreign land, and when he smells his alienation, is determined to destroy the woman who he feel is creator and created in this foreign land. Is this an exaggeration meant to embody imperialist England’s lusty intentions towards their new colonies? I think so. Rochester longs to "conquer' wild, exotica Antoinette, and when he sees she cannot be subdued, he cuts her down instead of admitting his own blunders in a foreign domain.
ReplyDeleteThis comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDeleteDoes it seem like the mind/body split is not as sharply drawn in Wide Sargasso Sea as it is in Jane Eyre? Physical sensations, material conditions, olfactory and sensorial stimuli seem to press strongly on the characters. They overwhelm the Rochester character for example: "Everything is too much, I felt as I rode wearily after her. Too much blue, too much purple, too much green. The flowers too red, the mountains too high, the hill too near" (63). Why is such natural beauty so offensive? What is "too much" about it all? That it's different from the English climate? That it engages the viscera and not the mind? That it blurs the line between man and nature, the body and mind - those dichotomies that seem to make the world easier to navigate and organize? Thornfield Hall can enclose, seal off the inside from the outside. Shelter is different in WSS, not as fortifying perhaps. Thornfield Hall has battlements. In WSS there's the glacis -- the opposite of a defensive structure.
ReplyDelete