The Finger Turner

Bram Stokers, Dracula, from the late-Victorian era, is one of the best stories of vampire folklore. Dracula was tall, dark, handsome, and mysterious with immense sexual character. His snow white teeth which outlined his rosy red lips made us fantasize of him and ultimately become obsessed. The overwhelming fascination of Stoker’s novel has created individuals to overlook the true metaphoric mechanism behind the story. “Technologies of Monstrosity: Bram Stoker’s “Dracula””, Judith Halberstam points out the metaphor in which Dracula was created.

Nathaniel Hawthorne was one of the representatives of the Dark Romanticism genre. The cultural and literal context, stylistic features and main themes of the Hawthorne’s short story The Birthmark will be discussed in this essay.

Many gothic novels have tried to create an unsettling feeling within their audiences. None have achieved this quite as well as Dracula. The jarring transitions of action, and the sharp cliffhangers create many moments of suspense and unease. Using epistolary format is also a way of creating nervousness in the readers, as it not only make the story “believable”, but introduces many stories woven into one large mystery. However, the transitions of story is not the only factor creating the feeling of apprehension within the book. To create these feelings to his greatest potential, in Dracula, Bram Stoker uses symbolism to reinforce the uneasy atmosphere.

Orr uses imagery to show the reader that events can mentally scar one’s memory, in which a person vividly remembers that moment perfectly. To do this Orr uses lots of descriptive words and phrases that bring the reader to visualize the scene of the poem. An example is, "the dark stain already seeping across his parka hood"(2). The speaker has this image implanted in his mind, because it is the first thing that he sees right after he has shot his brother. As one reads this line, they can picture the image of blood seeping through the material of the hood in their mind, making them feel as if they are standing there with him. In addition, Orr uses the imagery of death throughout the poem. By writing, “In the bowl, among the vegetable chunks / pale shapes of the alphabet bobbed at random or lay in the shallow spoon” (15-17). The speaker is visualizing the pale deceased

In the beginning of the story, the narrator admires her husband and all of his features saying “to herself she also praised his mouth, full and likable, his skin the color of pink brick, and even his forehead, neither noble nor broad, but still smooth and unwrinkled”(273). The newlywed couple is in love and the narrator admires her husband’s face as he peacefully sleeps next to her. This admiration does not last long because the narrator then shifts her focus to the hand she is laying on and it suddenly becomes this monstrous thing that scares her into realizing what she’s gotten into. The narrator looks down to see “the thumb stiffened itself out, horribly long and spatulate, and pressed tightly against the index finger so that the hand suddenly took on a vile, apelike appearance”(274). This change in her perception of the hand represents her realization that she is no longer innocent and young, but that she married a stranger and would be stuck with him the rest of her

Long before the likes of Raymond Carver, George Saunders and Lydia Davis, Flannery O’Connor was writing biting, grotesque gothic tales, scattered with strong religious and moral overtones. Her symbolic stories contrasted characters in existential extremes in simmering situations. In O’Connor’s precise and charged worlds, where something is always about to happen, she writes like she’s sucking oxygen from a room. Ultimately her work is deeply psychological, but she was the first to say that was not her interest and on more than one occasion was concerned about her work’s misreading.2 The Lame Shall Enter First 3 is a fine example of her deeply conflicted morals and beliefs, seeing human nature and society as innately corrupted, with redemption as the only way to alleviate suffering. Using psychological theory to explore the themes, this analysis mirrors Flannery O’Conner’s own conflicted short literary life. She died of lupus aged 39 having written two novels, 32 short stories and the occasional review and essay.

In a tale like “The Goblin Market,” it is easy to stop at the surface for a moral story – a young woman risks her life to save her sister. But with the imagery and language

Through the course of the novel being unfolded the author, Kelly, used figurative language to show a connection between a knife and destructive and painful thoughts to those who have

Chilling through and through, The Lovely Bones, by Alice Sebold, is a tale of both murder and growth, and, more so, the latter after the former. Introduced, quite bluntly, within the very first two lines of the novel, readers meet the narrator, “Salmon, like the fish; first name, Susie. . . murdered [at age 14] on December 6, 1973” (1). Susie, brutally raped and killed by a foul, twisted serial killer by the name of Mr. Harvey, is now giving the audience an eerie, psychologically thrilling recountal on the lives of those she once knew who continue to live. In a fascinating twist, Sebold has Susie go into detailed aspects of Mr. Harvey’s life, past, and the nature of his corruption. Although humans are not inherently or entirely benevolent or malevolent creatures from birth, one can see how the nurture of a human directly influences their qualities as seen through Mr. Harvey’s characterization and development.

In literature, however, scars, marks, and deformities speak even louder than they do in reality because writers often use them as symbols. Unlike real-world wounds, writers can manipulate a character’s injury to express a desired concept, theme, or representation

The stories of Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio are an intersecting group of tales that emphasize the grotesque over a wide spectrum. While some of Anderson’s stories focus upon the physical grotesque, other characterizations demonstrate the ability of the human psyche to exemplify the grotesque. Such is the case with Anderson’s short story “Hands.” “Hands” is a story of society’s tendency to marginalize those who can be categorized as grotesque, or those who simply refuse categorization entirely. Anderson’s tale of social isolation utilizes the image of the hands to symbolize the emotional expression of Wing Biddlebaum in order to drive an implicit theme that emotional internalization and social isolation is a veritable prison.

Novel in particular and literature in general is more than just a work of fiction but in fact the hidden reflection of a specific historical era. Although, Frankenstein, Wuthering Heights and Dracula were written in different times and each leaves its readers with different emotion and contemplation stages, they all share an affinity: the presence of Gothic elements. Indeed, these novels are designed to lead their reader into thrilling journeys through spooky dark setting, suspense horrifying plot, and claustrophobic atmosphere. These elements, though appear in various forms throughout these three novels, still excellently accomplish their mission of enticing the readers to be caught up in the narrative.

Film adaptations based on particular works such as Dickens’s Great Expectations are not the only means through which we get a glimpse of Victorian culture and society. Animated films such as Tim Burton’s Corpse Bride (2005) represent the Victorian era through humor and exaggeration and reveal Burton’s awareness of 19th century English society. In his study Gothic Fantasy: The Films of Tim Burton, Edwin Page argues that Burton’s films are not realistic in nature, but like fairy tales they communicate through symbolic imagery, as they speak of “things far deeper within our conscious and subconscious minds than most films would dare to delve” (7).

All too often the gothic literature genre is reduced in its interpretation to gloomy weather and archaic haunted houses. These patterns do exist, but they do not define the genre. Gothic literature found its niche in the 18th and 19th centuries, and during the Victorian era it served a more nuanced purpose than simply to scare readers. Many gothic authors used a monster as a vessel to symbolize topics that the Victorian era sensibilities would label as “monstrous.” They are the incarnation of the taboo subjects society is trying to repress. In Bram Stoker’s Dracula and Edgar Allan Poe’s “A Tell-Tale Heart”, the authors use Freudian symbolism along with literary symbolism to demonstrate the repercussions of repressing “id” desires.

It took me quite a while to find a story I could really get into and dissect deeply for this paper. I’m not a big reader, nor have I ever been. However, in the few short weeks that I have attended this class, I’ve been exposed to an entirely different approach to reading and understanding short stories. I’ve learned that there is more to the story than just the words on the page; rather a deeper, more personalized way of perceiving the story. After reading countless stories I finally found A House of Flesh to be the perfect story for my paper.