Session 9: Lights! Camera! Action!

2nd Global Conference

Monday 16th May – Wednesday 18th May 2011
Warsaw, Poland

Psycho and the Modern Gothic
Markku Koski
Lahti University of Applied Sciences, Lahti, Finland

Grant Wood´s painting American Gothic is one of the most familiar images in 20th century American art. Wood’s inspiration came from a cottage designed in the Gothic Revival style with a distinctive upper window and a decision to paint the house along with “the kind of people I fancied should live in that house.” The painting shows a farmer standing beside his spinster daughter. The woman is dressed in a colonial print apron mimicking 19th century Americana and the couple are in the traditional roles of men and women, the man’s pitchfork symbolizing hard labor, and the flowers over the woman’s right shoulder suggesting domesticity.

Wood´s painting has been interpreted, imitated, appropriated and parodied in many ways. It came to my mind when I was writing a piece about Alfred Hitchcock´s Psycho, which had it´s premiere fifty years ago. Hitchcock´s film is one of the best examples of a style which can be called American gothic. Everyone who has seen it can remember the sinister-looking house on the hill, where Norman Bates´ mother is supposed to live.

The name of Wood has not often mentioned in the connection of Psycho. The most obvious influence to Hitchcock has been Edward Hopper and his famous painting House by the Railroad. The houses in Hopper and Hitchcock look exactly the same, and the theme of both works is modernity and it´s terror which can be called “modern gothic”. Modernity in Hopper has taken over the old gothic house and the railway – and the new highway in Psycho has taken over both the mother´s house and the motel.

The connection between both artists does not necessarily end here, because Hopper is also known about his paintings about the lonely urban landscapes and it´s “lonely crowd”. Psycho also stars from a big city with it´s small hotels and office-buildings. The scenes along the highway also remind very much Hopper´s other paintings. Those visions are an example about modern gothic, where terror is always hiding behind the streamlined architecture and money-economy.

But the rustic couple of Wood´s painting can also be found in Psycho. In the later scenes of Psycho Hitchcock paints cinematically rich portrait of a nearby small countryside town. There is a short but meaningful scene where the town´s sheriff and his wife stand outside the church of the town and listen what the Marion Crane´s lover and sister has to tell them. The earnest-looking sheriff can be compared to Wood´s laborer and his wife is as quintessentially domestic as the woman in Wood´s painting. Both Wood´s and Hitchcock´s couple are helplessly looking at the modern world which has invaded their so seemingly safe homeland.

Download Draft Conference Paper (pdf)

Gothic Romance Revisited: Villians on Screen and a Twist in Convention
Dagmara Zając
Jagiellonian University, Krakow, Poland

Vampires, ghosts, and brand new incarnations of Frankenstein’s monster do not cease to capture the popular imagination. Still, contemporary Gothic appropriations differ considerably from their original forms. The paper aims at focusing on one of the most fascinating twists in the Gothic convention: the transformation of the villain character. The change itself, though quite noteworthy, has received relatively little critical attention. In the earliest Gothic novels by Anne Radcliff or Charlotte Dacre, the role of the villain was precisely determined by the genre’s formulaic traits: similarly to the maiden he used to persecute, he was a stock character. The fixed structure of the Gothic novel did not allow for any ambiguity or changes in the villain’s disposition. Starting with Walpole’s Manfred, the subsequent generations of evildoers were supposed to kidnap the heroines and murder the rightful heirs without remorse. Nevertheless, as time went by, the villain character has become more complex – and indeed more interesting – than the hero himself. Influenced by tragic Romantic figures such as Byron’s Giaour,  the persecutor started showing features of both Don Juan and Faust: he could eventually be regarded as the admirable sufferer, tormented by unspeakable passions. For the bored heroine, this ominous, yet seductive dark side proved to be more alluring than her virtuous lover’s single-minded righteousness. I want to argue that this hero-villain character, described by Leslie Fiedler as “the victim of passion and circumstance,” took over popular imagination through  American horror film of the 1930s. The Gothic convention (faithfully adapted for screen) started to show signs of disintegration, as the hero-villain, played by Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi, was becoming a central star to the show. The paper aims at discussing this curious shift in focus, manifested through Universal Studios’ cinematic productions.

My paper is on John William Polidori’s The Vampyre (1819), possibly the most influential horror story of all time.  Written in the summer 1816 just after Lord Byron had sacked him as his physician and travelling companion during his 1816 Grand Tour, Polidori’s story launched a vampire craze in England and on the continent. It was the first work to recast the vampire mythology by elevating the figure of the undead to the dignity of high social rank and to establish the association between vampirism and sexuality. Most importantly, Polidori succeded in endowing his tale with subtle psychological implications.

I would like to show that, for Polidori, vampirism was essentially a metaphor for inner conflicts regarding himself and the tempestuous relationship he had with Lord Byron. The story can be read as both the dramatization of Polidori’s ambivalent feeling towards his employer (mixed feelings of admiration and hatred) and the illustration of his own uncertain subjectivity. A psychic conflict which the entangled case of The Vampyre’s publication illustrates perfectly.

In a psychoanalitic perspective, vampirism is not only the expression of a kinship between Eros and Thanathos, but, at a deeper level, the manifestation of a desire for fusion and incorporation typical of the oral stage. As such, vampirism creates an omnipotent couple, a couple based on an identity of blood, where dependence is absolute and separation impossible. The Vampyre can be read both as an acting out of revenge and as an indictment towards Byron, as well as a sort of confessional self-portrait showing Polidori’s subordinate position and difficulty in achieving the separation-individuation which is at the base of the stable sense of self.

While Lord Ruthven, clearly modelled on Lord Byron, is portrayed a master of seduction, a cynical aristocrat, a triumphant rebel defiant of socio-moral codes, Aubrey is viewed as a naive, idealistic young man whose gender identity is unstable.

I am Associate Professor of English literature at the University of Venice, Ca’Foscari. I have published books and essays on American literature (James, Brown, Hawthorne, Melville, Alcott), on English fiction and poetry (Stevenson, Shelley, Wilde, Hardy, Eliot, Yeats) and on postcolonial literature (Trevor, Atwood, Conrad, Coetzee).

My most recent publications include: “The Naked Man fom the Sea: Identity and Separation in The Secret Sharer, “Markheim and the Shadow of the Other”, “La maledizione del drago e il Tiziano perduto di Christina Rossetti”, “In viaggio verso la terra promessa: The Amateur Emigrant di R. L. Stevenson”. I have edited Desiderio e trasgressione nella letteratura fantastica, a book on fantastic literature with an introduction on the fantastic genre and an essay on Stevenson’s “The Bottle Imp”.

My most recent publications are Nel segno dell’horror. Forme e figure di un genere with an introduction and an essay on “Frankenstein and its Hideous Progeny”; “That Picture Should Be Painted”: Vernon Lee’s Oke of Okehurst (2008); Mary Shelley: The Journal of Sorrow” (2009); “I am not Pakistani, I speak English!’ East is East, una commedia multietnica” (2009); “Stevenson, Calvino and All the Devils in Italy” (2009); “Waiting for a Ghost’. J.M Coetzee’s The Master of Petersburg (2009) and finally “A Land of Ghosts: Peter Carey Oscar and Lucinda” (2009).

Download Draft Conference Paper (pdf)