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OCR 'The Gothic' comparative essay - To what extent do you agree that writers of gothic fiction present the lines between good and evil as blurred?
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An example essay comparing 'Dracula' and 'The Bloody Chamber'.
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To what extent do you agree that writes of gothic fiction present the lines betweengood and evil as blurred?
Duality is never very far away whatever gothic text you may be reading, and one of
the ways in which it manifests itself is as the fight between good and evil. Dracula is a book
about battles, the central drama being the bloody struggle between Count Dracula and his
stake-wiedling foes. The lines between good and evil and seemingly clear-cut, however
upon further inspection there appear to be discrepancies as to what defines these forces of
‘light’ and ‘dark’ and to what extent they may overlap. Similarly in the Bloody Chamber, good
and evil may even intertwine frequently as Carter questions the reader who should hold the
authority to decide who the villains and the heroes really are.
In Dracula, it is clear from the first moment we meet the Count that he possesses something
unnatural and uncanny. Jonathan Harker writes how he spoke ‘good English, but with a
strange intonation’ indicating his familiarity and yet undeniable ‘otherness’. As the story
progresses and Dracula takes further steps to infiltrate English society, the men who have
sworn to stop him must take exceedingly drastic measures. Dracula is presented as the
outsider and must be stopped because of his link to superstition, demons, and devils which
directly attacks the christian philosophy adhered to by Van Helsing and his friends. As
christian souls, it is therefore their duty to counterattack this demonic invasion and wield the
crucifix in Dracula’s face. They see themselves as the forces of good and morality, with the
christian imagery painting them almost as religious crusaders in Van Helsing’s speech: ‘if we
fall, we fall in good cause’. Death is surely a worthy price to pay to defeat pure evil. Stoker’s
protestant upbringing in Ireland likely first brought him into contact with religious philosophy
which deals, centrically, with good vs evil, God vs the devil. This central struggle underlies
the whole of Dracula, making it open to interpretation as a christian fable - the critic Raible
writes: ‘Dracula is, of course, a morality play. Forces of good and evil, clearly defined, clash
until the climax and final destruction of the dread Vampire.’ This ‘clearly defined’ nature of
the players in Dracula makes it difficult for the reader to ever see the lines between good
and evil as ‘blurred’.
However, in Carter’s The Bloody Chamber, the lines between good and evil are not
always so clearly defined and therefore are more open to personal interpretation. For
example in ‘Wolf-Alice’ the duke with whom Alice shares the castle is merely a half-being,
trapped in a state of limbo. This liminality which he inhabits allows him to exist outside of the
laws of nature, much like Dracula. He does not even conform to superstitious laws, he uses
the cross as a ‘scratching post’ and ‘laps up holy water’ from the baptism font. For this
reason we perceive him as a terrifying, unnatural power, and could easily place him in the
realm of evil for his vicious and bloody tendencies. However at the end of the story we see
him take on the power to transform; as Wolf-Alice tends lovingly to his wounds we see him
shift from a state of liminality to a complete existence. Therefore Carter is arguing that love
possesses the transformative power to save even the most powerful damned creatures and
make them gentle. Similarly, by the end of The Courtship of Mr Lyon, even the seemingly
violent Beast becomes a pussycat through Beauty’s love for him - he has begun to ‘purr’. It is
the role of the reader to decide whether or not these beings are truly evil since they are
shown to be capable of dramatic transformation. The idea of transformation, good becoming
evil and dark becoming light, is crucial to the effect of The Bloody Chamber since Carter’s
intention was to reformulate traditional tales. She admitted how the rigidity and heavily
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