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

'Bram Stoker’s Dracula debuted in squeamish England at the decision of the nineteenth atomic number 6. Not the first lamia bilgewater of its time, it certainly made cardinal of the most tenacious impressions on advanced culture, where tales of the supernatural, plague, witchcraft, possession, demoniacs, vampires, werewolves, zombies, aliens, and monsters of solely figures halt hold come out something of a theme in modern-day ruse, if non an obsession.\r\nMany scholars debate the origin or take a crap of this phenomenon, merely most agree that culture plays an gigantic role in the development of much(prenominal) themes, whether in nineteenth century gothic novels such as Dracula or Frankenstein, or in modern frivol a miens with gothic leanings, such as The Exorcist or Children of Men. This paper go out examine how magic and the view of the supernatural, including the â€Å"undead,” is an important underlying fear prevalent in the psyche of hu uni verseity, which manifests itself differently, dep baring on the social or diachronic circumstances which spawns the cr feedion of that work of literature or film.\r\nBy placing Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein within the mount of its Romantic/Enlightenment era, E. Michael J stars shows how the effects of the revolutionary philosophical system of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Marquis de de de Sade, and Percy Bysshe Shelley found their ultimate expection in the gothic repulsion genre (90). Dracula, no little than Frankenstein, is indicative of the heathen underbelly that the Victorian mature sought to cover up. Far from speaking identical a shot of the human passions unleashed by the Romantic era, the Victorian advance found it to a greater extent(prenominal) appropriate to hide them, animation them out of the public sphere, render them smellless, and thereby specify life respectable.\r\nThe problem was, the less those passions were talked about, but acted upon, the more thos e same passions bubbled up to the surface by dint of and through and through the intend of gothic horror novels and films. fleck, Oscar Wilde’s â€Å"art for art’s sake” carried the artistic universe out of the Victorian Age and into the twentieth century of un detainrained expressionism, Wilde himself fell victim to the very underbelly of Victorian Englandâ€which, in fact, prosecuted him to the unspoiledest extent of the justness when his vices became open cognition to the public.\r\nStoker’s Dracula was just as representative of his aver internal desires masked by Victorian prudery. But because Stoker for the most fail kept his affairs from becoming public s digestdal, he was left well enough alone to express what everyone was interested in anyway, and which has always been an easy vender: sex. Controlling the passions had always been the interest of the Catholic Church, which was the European bul strugglek against revolution, with assist ance from the suit of Augustine to the scholasticism of doubting doubting Thomas to the architecture of the gothic cathedrals.\r\nWith the growing corruption of umpteen Church officials, the rise of the Renaissance and the Protestant Reformation, that accountant was finally threatened and replaced. New philosophies were spread (Rousseau’s c erstpt of record as the tho law; Sade’s concept of that same nature as brutal, animalistic, and violent), which unleashed a tidal wave of motif revolutionaries in Paris at the end of the ordinal century, which in turn needed new types of control. pile was the immediate result.\r\nVictorian prudery was the nineteenth century’s later response. It enabled Mary Shelley to turn her hubby into a â€Å"Victorian angel,” as she â€Å"dedicated the rest of her life to effacing their familiar experiment” (Jones 91) with Byron in Geneva, memorialized, however, by Ken Russell’s 1987 film Gothic, in which de Sade’s Justine informs Mary Shelley of what could soon be expected. What Sade foresaw, and helped promote, was a informal revolution that would elevate sexual desire from the restraints of me fracture offval Church philosophy.\r\n temporary hookup that teetotum led to the enforcement of a new social calculate 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 subdues as he has vices. Sade’s assessment was akin(predicate) in the eighteenth century: â€Å"The conjure up of the honorable man is one of tranquility and peace; the state of an immoral man is one of perpetual fermentation” (Jones 6).\r\nYet, temporary hookup Augustine promoted peace, Sade, who exercised some governmental sway in the Reign of Terror, promoted unrest: â€Å"By promoting vice, the r egime promotes slavery, which can be fashioned into a form of governmental control” (Jones 6). Such was in line with Robespierre’s tenet of terror as persuasion. Stoker’s Dracula was an expression of just such an fancyâ€for Stoker himself knew the validity of both those claims: a seducer of young women, Stoker doubtlessly identified with Jonathan Harker and Dracula, the captive and master all at once.\r\nThe vampire became a part of iconic horror status in film in the following century. The concept of the walking â€Å"undead” who feed on the argumentation of innocents conjured up something so threatening and stimulating in the minds of audiences all over the world that vampirism was everywhere, from Nosferatu to Bela Lugosi to Carl Theodor Dreyer’s Vampyr. Dreyer, who had shot what is considered one of the greatest slow films of all time, The Passion of Joan of Arc, found his inspiration for his vampire film in the likes of Magnus Hirsc hfeld.\r\nHirschfeld was an honorary member of the British Society for Sexual Psychology and something of a flick star himself in Weimar Germany, playing an â€Å"enlightened, sexually condoning ready in Richard Oswald’s pro-homosexual film Anders als die Andern” (Jones 194). The themes of sexual license and control had a hearty impact 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.\r\nIn Dr. Seward’s diary, one finds no less: a blood transfusion is given to Lucy by Van Helsing, who states, â€Å"She unavoidablenesss blood, and blood she mustiness have or die” (Stoker 123). Lucy has been bitten by the vampire and become, in a sense, contaminated. The only scientific cure is to give her want she wants: blood. The allusion to other blood substitute is obviousâ€but the sense is inverted: While T. S. Eliot states in Murder in the Cathedral the kinship between saviorian sacrifice and control of the passions (â€Å"His simple eye for ours, Blood for blood”), Enlightenment science suggests no sacred remedyâ€merely a bodily or mental one: a psychological/ tangible giving into desire rather than a spiritual dominance of it.\r\nJones speaks of the sexual revolution that ran concomitantly with the French Revolution as the authoritative forbeargonr of gothic horror. Whereas othic cathedrals streng thused through visual representation the horror of fiend and sin, modern gothic horror does the sameâ€though the firmness of purpose is different (if there is one, and there a great deal is not: the immortal offense of Michael Myers, Jason, Krueger, etc. suggests that while Christ was the answer for Augustine and Aquinas, the Enlightenment has yet to spurt any acceptable solution). Meanwhile, the manipulation of desire, Jones notes, has found its way out of Victorian prudery and into the mainstre am through advertising, radio, television, music, and cinema. The conjuring trick of the â€Å"undead” in the George A.\r\nRomero franchise, which is still being updated, suggests a kind of public response to the world around it: a society full of living, walking deadâ€killed by the bombardment of uncontrolled passions, yet still living, shopping, attendance to social rituals. The sexual revolution and Enlightenment precept of the 1790s 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.\r\nHe is only stronger; and being stronger, have yet more world power to work evil. This vampire…is of himself so strong in person as twenty men; he is of cunning more than mortal…he have still the aids of ne cromancy, and all the dead that he can come nigh to be for him to restraint; he is brute, and more than brute; he is goliath in callous, and the heart of him is not. (Stoker 237) The portrayal is Satanic, and a quasi(prenominal) portrayal would be given in 1973’s The Exorcist, in which Satan possesses a young woman through the medium of a children’s game (the Ouija board).\r\nYet, with The Exorcist, the spiritual evil is made much more real than the fantastic evil of Dracula. And while Dracula is destruct by a stake, the devil is dispelled only through the power of Christ in The Exorcist. Ironically, however, the devil is control out only after the death of not one but two priestsâ€the old man initially, and then the younger priest, whose own crisis of faith becomes a kind of despair at the end of the film, when, ceasing to stimulate Satan through Christ, he cries, â€Å"Take me! instead, and then throws himself out the window when his own possession is com plete. 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 devilâ€it did not strangle him; such would have been too meaningful in the relativistic climate of the 70s. The 70’s sexual and governmental revolutions were intertwined to such an extent that hardcore soot and Feminist politics appeared on the scene simultaneously.\r\nWhile Betty Friedan opposed traditional gender 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 teen advancers by homicidal maniacs (evil incarnate), while virtuous and chaste maidens like Jamie lee Curtis’ caliber in Halloween remained alive just pine enough for the evil to be driven forward by a male authority figure. horror films often reinforced traditional gender norms, yet the awesome evil of those films seemed to have no end.\r\nWith t he proliferation of contraceptives as a form of eugenics similar to the kind serious 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 infrahuman by WASP elitists (406).\r\nThe black and Catholic communities, whose unrestrained breeding threatened to undermine WASP governmental control, promptly received the attention of people like Margaret Sanger and â€Å"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 bunghole contraception. The underbelly of the movement, however, was, according to Jones, nothing more than a power play for control.\r\nThe extremity of the situation would be explored by Alfonso Cuaron’s 2006 film Children of Men establish on the novel by P. D. James. Friend of Spanish filmmaker Guillermo del Toro, whose mime has been noted in â€Å" nigh Entomologist/Bad Entomologist” by Jones as a swipe at Enlightenment doctrine being a vain attempt at setting and controlling social mores (â€Å"The only solution left is the…prime totem of folk Catholicism, the rosary”â€referring, of course, to the end scene in which Mira Sorvino’s character draws blood rom her hand with a rosary crucifix to divert 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 girlsâ€in fact, children are departed alto pulsateher (a threatening theme that opens Del Toroâ₠¬â„¢s Mimic too). The rampant sterilisation of modern years is dour into a life-threatening ideology, affecting everyone and all ethnicities. When a woman is found, who has seemingly miraculously conceived, she is caught in the middle(a) of yet another struggle for controlâ€one group wants to use her as a political poster child, the other wants to legitimately help.\r\nMeanwhile, a war is waged in the urban cities, which evokes a kind of indicatory message of utter desolation. As Clive Owen’s character makes the ultimate sacrifice (his life) for that of the woman and her child’s, a sense of hope in the future of mankind is restoredâ€but the outlook is still bleak and pallidâ€for no one knows whether the woman and her child will really make it as they disappear into the confuse rolling across the open sea. Hope is in the approach of the ship, but beyond that liesâ€what?\r\nIn Children of Men, the fantasy of the â€Å"undead” is replaced by the fa ntasy of the â€Å"unborn. ” The reality of Malthusian sterilization taken to extremes in modern times 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 beginning of the Romantic/Enlightenment age have manifested themselves in a variety of forms depending upon the cultural climate of the time.\r\nBeginning with Shelley’s Frankenstein as a repudiation of Enlightenment doctrine and going through Stoker’s Dracula as a representation of sexual desire and control bubbling under the surface of Victorian prudery, gothic horror has found its way into the mainstream culture with tales of supernatural occurrences that are in some sense connected to the issues of the day. The sexual revolution of the early twentieth century in New York materialized in greater force all ove r America in the 60s and 70s, launching another series of gothic horror novels and films onto audiences, from Stephen King to whoremaster Carpenter, Clive Barker, and Stanley Kubrick.\r\nWhile films like The Exorcist and Children of Men get closer to the reality of spiritual possession and far-flung sterility, the human psyche of modern times continues to want to see itself as a kind of â€Å"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.\r\n'