Challenging the Status Quo Through the Classics

What, in other words, haunts our sense of Enlightenment science, our confident command of language and imagination, our self-assured position at the forefront of history, and our seemingly-concrete relationships and identities? The monsters of Gothic literature thus serve a very specific function: they serve, to borrow Julia Kristeva's term, to initiate a process of abjection that draws us "toward the place where meaning collapses." And by facing these monsters, whether it's the 'living' corpse of Frankenstein's Creature or the vampire Count Dracula, we face what has remained hidden, unspoken and suppressed both in ourselves and in our wider societies. 

Overall, these texts, as the "hideous progeny" of writers who are deeply critical of Enlightenment and Empire, remain perpetually relevant to readers who share the same doubts and fears about what's not shown and not said about their political moments. -Mr. Zac Fanni

Below are two insightful student interpretations of arguably the two most famous Gothic horror classics: 

Bram Stoker’s Dracula intersects with and interrogates the Victorian empire during a liminal phase in which “the old is dying and the new cannot be born”. This gothic horror story reflects a nation that is haunted by an overarching spectre of death and imperial collapse. In a rigid hegemonic civilization, Dracula is the personification of otherness, history and repressed desires/horrors that latches onto the bloated corpse of London. As an eastern figure, he troubles the centric worldview of the modernized, newly industrialized West. We interpreted this invasion by use of various critical lenses consisting of the psychoanalytic, queer, post-colonial, feminist and deconstructionist. GY students have discovered that the ostensible morality tale obscures a subtext concerning the limited scopes of human reason and a call for examination of who the parasite truly is – Dracula or Britain?

 

It is noteworthy that Frankenstein continues to be analyzed by young minds and remains a classic piece of writing from which connections to life, in the bizarre position we find ourselves in today, can be drawn. Throughout our two-month-long journey with the novel, I found myself genuinely learning as I explored stereotypes and the roles of society. Shelley examines morality, ethics and consequences, all aspects that must remain at the forefront of our minds as we continue in e-learning. Frankenstein and its takeaways have helped to highlight how critical it is to communicate with those around us, whether that be through text messages, FaceTime or just a simple phone call. The simple things are the new grand gestures in our lockdown lives.