Social and Historical Effects Responsible for the Conception of the Fantastic and Supernatural in Gothic Horror (Dracula)

Bram fire fighters genus genus Dracula de furthered in mincing England at the conclusion of the ordinal ampere-second. Not the first vampire story of its time, it certainly made wizard of the most lasting impressions on modern civilisation, where tales of the supernatural, detestation, witchcraft, possession, demoniacs, vampires, werewolves, zombies, aliens, and monsters of every last(predicate) kinds turn in bring into beingness something of a theme in modern art, if not an obsession.Many scholars controversy the origin or cause of this phenomenon, stock- relieve most agree that culture plays an enormous role in the development of such themes, whether in 19th century medieval novels such as Dracula or Frankenstein, or in modern fills with gothic leanings, such as The Exorcist or Children of Men. This paper will examine how hallucination and the idea of the supernatural, including the unbushed(p), is an important implicit in(p) fear prevalent in the psyche of human ity, which manifests itself differently, depending on the brotherly or historical circumstances which spawns the creation of that work of literature or film.By placing Mary Shelleys Frankenstein within the context of its Romantic/Enlightenment era, E. Michael J adepts shows how the set up of the revolutionary doctrine of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Marquis de de de de Sade, and Percy Bysshe Shelley put in their ultimate expression in the gothic horror genre (90). Dracula, no less than Frankenstein, is indicative of the heathenish underbelly that the Victorian Age sought to cover up. Far from m tabuh directly of the human passions unleashed by the Romantic era, the Victorian Age ground it to a greater extent appropriate to hide them, keep them out of the familiar sphere, break them sprightlinessless, and on that pointby make life respectable.The problem was, the less those passions were talked about, save acted upon, the more than(prenominal) those homogeneous passions bubbl ed up to the surface through the means of gothic horror novels and films. While, Oscar Wildes art for arts sake carried the artistic solid ground out of the Victorian Age and into the twentieth century of unhindered expressionism, Wilde himself cut d avow victim to the very underbelly of Victorian Englandwhich, in fact, prosecuted him to the fullest extent of the right when his vices became open knowledge to the public. stokers Dracula was entirely as representative of his own informal desires masked by Victorian prudery. only when because relief pitcher for the most part kept his affairs from becoming public s batchdal, he was left well enough alone to express what everyone was evoke in any office, and which has always been an easy seller trip. Controlling the passions had always been the provoke of the Catholic Church, which was the European bul wark against revolution, with assistance from the reason of Augustine to the scholasticism of doubting Thomas to the architectu re of the gothic cathedramyotrophic lateral sclerosis.With the growing corruption of many Church officials, the purloin of the Renaissance and the Protestant Reformation, that control was finally exist and replaced. sunrise(prenominal) philosophies were acidulate out (Rousseaus concept of nature as the only law Sades concept of that same nature as brutal, animalistic, and violent), which unleashed a tidal wave of radical revolutionaries in Paris at the end of the ordinal century, which in turn needed in the buff types of control. Napoleon was the immediate result.Victorian prudery was the nineteenth centurys later resolution. It enabled Mary Shelley to turn her husband into a Victorian angel, as she dedicated the rest of her life to effacing their inner experiment (Jones 91) with Byron in Geneva, memorialized, however, by Ken Russells 1987 film Gothic, in which de Sades Justine informs Mary Shelley of what could soon be expected. What Sade foresaw, and helped promote, was a inner revolution that would elevate sexual desire from the restraints of gothic Church doctrine.While that elevation led to the enforcement of a new brotherly code of conduct (Victorianism), an alternate development got underway in which that same elevation of sexual license was to be used itself as a form of control. In fact, Augustine had spoken of such centuries before when he wrote that a man has as many masters as he has vices. Sades perspicacity was similar in the eighteenth century The call down of the moral man is one of tranquility and peace the state of an base man is one of perpetual unrest (Jones 6).Yet, while Augustine promoted peace, Sade, who exercised some semipolitical sway in the Reign of Terror, promoted unrest By promoting vice, the regime promotes slavery, which can be fashioned into a form of political control (Jones 6). such was in line with Robespierres doctrine of terror as persuasion. Stokers Dracula was an expression of just such an ideafor Stoker himself knew the validity of both those claims a seducer of young women, Stoker doubtlessly determine with Jonathan Harker and Dracula, the captive and master all at once.The vampire became a fiber of iconic horror status in film in the next century. The concept of the walking un all in(p) who fed on the breed of innocents conjured up something so profound and stimulating in the minds of audiences all over the world that vampirism was everywhere, from Nosferatu to Bela Lugosi to Carl Theodor Dreyers Vampyr. Dreyer, who had shot what is considered one of the greatest silent films of all time, The Passion of Joan of Arc, found his inspiration for his vampire film in the equals of Magnus Hirschfeld.Hirschfeld was an honorary member of the British Society for Sexual Psychology and something of a movie star himself in Weimar Germany, playing an enlightened, sexually condoning doctor in Richard Oswalds pro-homosexual film Anders als die Andern (Jones 194). The themes of sexual licens e and control had a significant touch on Germany. Sigmund Freud would take up the themes in his psychoanalytic studies, promoting the fulfillment of sexual desires as a means of appeasing the subconscious.In Dr. Sewards diary, one finds no less a blood transfusion is thrustn to Lucy by Van Helsing, who states, She wants blood, and blood she must have or die (Stoker 123). Lucy has been bitten by the vampire and become, in a signified, contaminated. The only scientific cure is to give her want she wants blood. The allusion to another blood exchange is obviousbut the sense is inverted While T. S. Eliot states in Murder in the Cathedral the kind between saviourian sacrifice and control of the passions (His Blood for ours, Blood for blood), Enlightenment science suggests no spiritual remedymerely a forcible or psychological one a psychological/physical giving into desire rather than a spiritual dominance of it.Jones speaks of the sexual revolution that ran concomitantly with the Fr ench Revolution as the real forbearer of gothic horror. Whereas othic cathedrals strengthened through visual representation the horror of Satan and sin, modern gothic horror does the samethough the solution is different (if there is one, and there often is not the immortal evil of Michael Myers, Jason, Krueger, etc. suggests that while delivery boy was the answer for Augustine and Aquinas, the Enlightenment has even to formulate any acceptable solution). Meanwhile, the employment of desire, Jones notes, has found its way out of Victorian prudery and into the mainstream through advertising, radio, television, music, and cinema. The fantasy of the undead in the George A.Romero franchise, which is still being updated, suggests a kind of public response to the world around it a society full of living, walking deadkilled by the bombardment of uncontrolled passions, yet still living, shopping, attending to societal rituals. The sexual revolution and Enlightenment doctrine of the 1790 s and early twentieth century resurfaced in full throttle in the 1960s and 70s, to create a new wave of liberal social doctrine and a new wave of gothic horror in film. In Dracula, Mina Harker records the assessment of the evil of vampirism according to Van Helsing The nosferatu do not die like the bee when he sting once.He is only stronger and being stronger, have yet more power to work evil. This vampireis of himself so strong in person as twenty men he is of cunning more than mortalhe have still the aids of necromancy, and all the dead that he can come nigh to are for him to command he is brute, and more than brute he is devil in callous, and the heart of him is not. (Stoker 237) The portrait is Satanic, and a similar portrayal would be given in 1973s The Exorcist, in which Satan possesses a girl through the medium of a chelarens game (the Ouija board).Yet, with The Exorcist, the spiritual evil is made much more real than the fantastic evil of Dracula. And while Dracula is destr oyed by a stake, the devil is dispelled only through the power of Christ in The Exorcist. Ironically, however, the devil is driven out only after the death of not one but two prieststhe old man initially, and then the young priest, whose own crisis of faith becomes a kind of despair at the end of the film, when, ceasing to compel Satan through Christ, he cries, Take me instead, and then throws himself out the window when his own possession is complete. The girl is freed from her captor, but only at the cost of the life and soul of the young priest the power of Christ merely served to anger the devilit did not subjugate him such would have been too meaningful in the relativistic climate of the 70s. The 70s sexual and political revolutions were intertwined to such an extent that hardcore pornography and womens rightist politics appeared on the scene simultaneously.While Betty Friedan opposed traditionalistic sexual activity codes in such works as The Feminine Mystique, pornography was raking in the profits. The cinematic response to this was the slaughter of sexually-active teenagers by homicidal maniacs (evil incarnate), while virginal and chaste maidens like Jamie Lee Curtis region in Halloween remained alive just long enough for the evil to be driven away by a male authority figure. Horror films often reinforced traditional gender norms, yet the awesome evil of those films seemed to have no end.With the proliferation of contraceptives as a form of eugenics similar to the kind practiced under Hitler, sex became an act of passion without physical consequences yet horror maintained that it still had psychological and even spiritual ones. Nonetheless, as Jones shows, the promotion of contraception in twentieth century America by representatives of the Rockefeller Foundation was supposed to be nothing more than the controlling of ethnic populations that were found to be subhuman by WASP elitists (406).The black and Catholic communities, whose uninhibited br eeding threatened to undermine WASP political control, promptly received the attention of heap like Margaret Sanger and Rev. Theodore Hesburgh, C. S. C. , who used Rockefeller money to fund secret conferences on contraception at the University of Notre Dame from 1962 to 1965 (Jones 147). The idea of Thomas Malthus, that over-population would ultimately destroy the earth, was marketed as the principle behind contraception. The underbelly of the movement, however, was, according to Jones, nothing more than a power play for control.The extremity of the situation would be explored by Alfonso Cuarons 2006 film Children of Men based on the novel by P. D. James. adept of Spanish filmmaker Guillermo del Toro, whose Mimic has been noted in Good bug-hunter/Bad Entomologist by Jones as a swipe at Enlightenment doctrine being a vain attempt at setting and controlling social mores (The only solution left is the flush totem of folk Catholicism, the rosaryreferring, of course, to the end scene in which Mira Sorvinos character draws blood rom her hand with a rosary crucifix to gambol the attention of the giant blood-sucking roach, which is about to eat the little boy). In Children of Men, there are no little boys, nor little girlsin fact, children are departed altogether (a threatening theme that opens Del Toros Mimic too). The rampant sterilization of modern years is turned into a life-threatening ideology, affecting everyone and all ethnicities. When a cleaning woman is found, who has seemingly miraculously conceived, she is caught in the middle of yet another struggle for controlone group wants to use her as a political poster child, the other wants to legitimately help.Meanwhile, a war is waged in the urban cities, which evokes a kind of apocalyptic message of unwrap desolation. As Clive Owens character makes the ultimate sacrifice (his life) for that of the woman and her childs, a sense of hope in the future of mankind is restoredbut the outlook is still bleak an d grimfor no one knows whether the woman and her child will really make it as they disappear into the defile rolling across the open sea. Hope is in the approach of the ship, but beyond that lieswhat?In Children of Men, the fantasy of the undead is replaced by the fantasy of the unborn. The frankness of Malthusian sterilization taken to extremes in modern propagation by social groups across the globe (birth rates are at lows nearly everywhere), sexual liberation has once again become a pathway to political control and to gothic horror genre representations. In conclusion, the underlying fears of societies since the startle of the Romantic/Enlightenment age have manifested themselves in a smorgasbord of forms depending upon the cultural climate of the time.Beginning with Shelleys Frankenstein as a apostasy of Enlightenment doctrine and going through Stokers Dracula as a representation of sexual desire and control aglitter(p) under the surface of Victorian prudery, gothic horr or has found its way into the mainstream culture with tales of supernatural occurrences that are in some sense affiliated to the issues of the day. The sexual revolution of the early twentieth century in New York materialized in greater force all over America in the 60s and 70s, launching another series of gothic horror novels and films onto audiences, from Stephen King to stool Carpenter, Clive Barker, and Stanley Kubrick.While films like The Exorcist and Children of Men get closer to the reality of spiritual possession and widespread sterility, the human psyche of modern times continues to want to see itself as a kind of undead creature, whose reason for being has yet to be determined. Therefore, popular gothic horror icons like Frankenstein and Dracula remain staples of modern horror fiction, representing to the populace a mirror of its own struggles with the doctrine of Enlightenment liberation and control.