The Bloody Chamber, Dracula and the Gothic critics

The Bloody Chamber

"Fairytales clothe themselves in sterotypes and archetypes" - Vandermeer
"Carter's characters are forever escaping socially, mentally and physically, the traps laid by men" - Vandermeer
"I was taking the latent content of those traditional stories and using that; and the latent content is violently sexual" - Carter
"The heronies of these stories are struggling out of the straitjackets of history and ideology and biological essentialism" - Simpson
"They are not fearful of sex just their sexual partner's designs on them" - Makinen
"Otherness takes centre stage" - Botting
"Carter demonstrates the reversal of values that occurs in Gothic literature" - Botting
"Lambhood and tigerishness may be found in either gender and in the same individual at different times" - Atwood
"The Bloody Chamber's main function is destabilising the figure of woman as purely passive object of the male gaze" - Wood
"demonstrates the reductive attempt of humanity to define characters of men and women in binary opposition" - Wood
"The Snow Child is a masculine fantasy" - Bacchilega
"The good will be justified and prosper. The evil will come to a bad end, often a gruesome bad end" - Bayatt
"Carter's work has consistently dealt with women who grab their own sexuality and fight back" - Makinen

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"Dracula is above all concerned with the breaking of Taboos" - Punter and Byron
"He functions as the catalyst for transgression in others" - Punter and Byron
"Stoker's novel subordinates female sexuality to a masculine perspective" - Botting
"Uncannily straddeling the borders between life and death and thereby undoing a fundamental human fact" - Botting
"The coloniser finds himself in the position of the colonised, the exploiter becomes exploited, the victimizer victimized" - Arata
"It is this lack of agency in her own destiny that is the truest tragedy of Lucy's story" - Simpson
"Gothic texts of the time repeatedly produce powerful and sexually aggressive females as alien of monstrous" - Punter and Byron
"The Count is simultaneously a historical and modern threat" - Stoker
"Sex was the monster that troubles Stoker most" - Hindel
"With his ability to usurp the female role of creating life, and with his consumption of blood as a triumph over fears of menstruation, it may be that Dracula is the ultimate male fantasy" - Cluley
"Dracula embodies the fear of the unknown and he personifies the 'nothing in the darkness' that keeps children awake at night" - Roberts
"Lucy is an inversion of the modest and virtuous Victorian woman; she becomes sexually aggressive and anti-maternal" - Gates

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"The myth in Dracula is an invesion of Christianity" - Punter
"Jonathan appears more concerned about the vampire women - they are more horrible and fascinating to him" - Roth
"For Mina... all the men become her sons" - Roth

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"At the heart of the Gothic text is the tension provided by the possible violation of innocence - the concept of 'virtue in distress'"
"Gothic fictions seemed to promote vice and violence, giving free reign to selfish ambitions and sexual desires beyond the prescriptions of law or familial duty" - Botting
"Illegitimate power and violence is not only put on display but threatens to consume the world of civilised and domestic values" - Botting
"Gothic texts tend to be about transgression, overstepping boundaries and entering a realm of the unknown" - Kidd
"In many Gothic novels the castle represents a threatening, sexually rapacious masculine world in which women are trapped and persecuted" - Bunten
"The castle seems to represent both physically and metaphorically the darkness at the heart of the Gothic" - Bunten
"The Gothic should be considered as a 'mode of writing' that responds in certain diverse yet recognisable ways to the conflicts and anieties of its historical moment" - Chaplin

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