'A paradise of my own creation': Domesticity and the gothic in Jane Austen's 'Northanger Abbey', Mary Shelley's 'Frankenstein', and Bram Stoker's 'Dracula'.

摘要

While critics often neglect Gothic novels as part of a literary movement with little to offer in terms of valuable insights, many Gothic novels do, in fact explore relevant cultural themes and ideas, such as the methods of constructing proper families and domestic circles. This study examines the ways in which Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, and Bram Stoker's Dracula as works that endorse the safety and harmony of domestic circles.; In her novel Northanger Abbey, Austen uses Gothic conventions to educate her characters in how to form acceptable engagements by learning to see the world using both rational thought and sensibility in their proper places. By joining Catherine and Henry along with their two seemingly opposing worldviews, Austen "juxtaposes the 'alarms of romance' to the 'anxieties of life' in order to enable [the reader] to see their interdependence... [as well as] their indistinguishability" (Johnson "Introduction" xiv-xv). In Frankenstein, Shelley relates the importance of familial responsibility and the consequences of denying this responsibility. With each concentric tale told within the novel's frame, Shelley provides a glimpse into different levels of success within domestic relationships between family and friends, and as the novel closes, Shelley allows a glimpse of hope for the domestic, through Walton's embrace of the responsibilities of a mature adult. In Dracula, Bram Stoker uses domestic connections to explain the necessity of creating proper relationships in order to nullify the forces that threaten the families of England. Stoker presents a woman, Mina Harker, who faces the Gothic threat and reestablishes domestic harmony by combining the best of modern attitudes and education as well as traditional wants and needs of a close domestic unit.