Session 5: Gothic Mindscapes
2nd Global Conference
Monday 16th May – Wednesday 18th May 2011
Warsaw, Poland
Forensic Psychology and the New Gothic
Neil McCaw
University of Winchester, Hampshire, UK
Historically ‘the Gothic’ has embodied ideas of Otherness and repression, and a dialectic of attraction and repulsion. Gothic narratives reside in the space of what is known and what cannot (or will not) be known, with writers capitalising on the creative imaginations of their audiences through suggestion and implication. The later C20th and early C21st century fetishisation of forensic science challenges the ethos of such a narrative strategy by insisting upon a world that can always be definitively understood, through the lens of detailed genetic, biological, and psychological/psychoanalytical examination. And yet the Gothic sensibility remains, articulated in popular-cultural forms that revisit the familiar archetypes of vampirism, genetic mutation, and psychological disintegration. Squaring the circle, other modern narrative forms resituate and redefine Gothic archetypes of villainy and Outsider-ness in terms of forensic psychology, within the context of a broader interest in clinical human personality disorders. These clinical disorders serve as the new Other that postmodern audiences are attracted to and repelled by. Modern TV series such as Dexter, and films such as Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, embody such a concern with a contemporary version of the dark Gothic underside of human experience against which ‘normality’ strikes such a contrast. In the UK this new criminal-Gothic landscape of the human mind is inextricably woven into the work of Lynda La Plante, in her Prime Suspect, Trial and Retribution and Above Suspicion series In each of these Britain is reconfigured as a Gothic backdrop of the strange and the unknown, with criminal subjects lurking on the margins of society as peculiarly contemporary versions of the monstrous. Therein the exposure of modern UK audiences to a contemporary Gothic sensibility goes hand-in-hand with an evolving scientific, forensic concern with personality disorders such as APD, sociopathy, and psychopathy, part of an overarching fixation with the intricacies of psychological Otherness.
Clive Barker, Imaginer: The Gothic Tradition, Its Meaning, and Influence On His Art Forms
Russell Cherrington
Film Production, University of Derby, Derbyshire, UK
Clive Barker’s myriad work explores the idea of transformation through motifs established in the gothic fiction tradition, using a framework of horror, fantasy and sexuality. There are many discernible influences on his work; these include Jean Cocteau, Francisco Goya, Hieronymus Bosch, Herman Melville, J.M Barrie, James Whale, Mary Shelly, Christopher Marlowe and William Blake. It is the link with William Blake and Jean Cocteau that gives the truest representation of Barker’s creative oeuvre as a polymath.
Barker’s frequent use of transformation as a motif reinforces his philosophical connection to Mary Shelley’s school of Gothicism, and to the larger school of nineteenth century romanticism. He is a highly literate writer, with a masterful sense of prose; this is something of an anomaly with modern horror fiction. The key form in Barker’s work is the Faustian pact tale, which he has used to structure his plots, examples being his first novel Damnation Game and within the film ‘Hellraiser’.
The paintings and drawings created by Barker for novels such as ‘Abarat’ and ‘Thief of Always’ contain a link to the Gothic, which is so profound and beautiful in its twisted elegance. Every stage of his imaginative process is related to art and Barker writes using his own images as the creative spark. It is not by accident that he illustrates his own book covers and internal pages; it is part of the whole that is Clive Barker Imaginer.
The fixing of the products of the imagination is summed up in Barker’s credo – ‘That which can be imagined need never be lost’ – and I will consider the nature and variety of his achievements across diverse creative fields relating the importance of the marriage of images and words within the evolution of his worlds within my paper.
Gothic Ennui: The Cultural Relevance of Three Novels
Michel Pierre Laffitte
Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Netherlands
This paper explores how the notion of ‘ennui’ (commonly described as boredom) in three selected texts attempts to negotiate historical moments of overwhelming cultural change. ‘Ennui’ as a word already existed in the French language, but the publication of Baudelaire’s first major work Les Fleurs Du Mal (1857) contributed to a change in meaning which would later be adopted by subsequent writers such as Oscar Wilde. Baudelaire’s use of ‘ennui’ refers to a state of utter desolation and forlornness contrary to its literal translation; boredom. This paper examines the ways in which Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), William Beckford’s Vathek (1786) and Ann Rice’s Interview with the Vampire (1976) function as examples of ennui, and how they have raised anxieties around matters that were foremost in the cultural contexts in which they were produced. Although written in separate centuries, these works use their disaffected protagonists to reflect on, and criticise their contemporary societies. In this paper, correlations between Vathek, notions of early Orientalism, and the social position of Indians in eighteenth-century Great Britain are examined from a postcolonial perspective. A parallel is drawn between the degenerative development of the protagonist in Wilde’s novel and the moral decay of the falling nineteenth-century British empire, focussing primarily on class struggles in Victorian society. The analysis of Rice’s novel deals with the social position of women by identifying misogynous structures. It is argued that the text exemplifies the social position of women in the late twentieth century. I chose these texts because they were written in different parts of the world and at different times, exemplifying ennui’s international and timeless character. Furthermore, these writers demonstrate the ways in which they participated – either directly or indirectly – in their contemporary cultural debates by utilising ennui as a tool for criticism.
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