Gothic architecture flourished during the high and late medieval periods. The upper echelons of the feudal system were so impressed by the looming cathedrals that they had their castles built in the same Gothic style. These castles are both striking and sinister: the large vaulted ceilings and flying buttresses dwarf and intimidate the serf or visitor. It was a time of patriarchal power and occult beliefs, with the castle symbolizing many tropes that also belong to the Gothic literary movement, such as terror, incarceration, the psyche, and the supernatural. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why violent video games should not be banned”?Get the original essayThe essay explores the role of the castle, particularly its connection and relationship with the idea of ​​hierarchy and the feudal system; vulnerability, death and the aesthetics of terror; and psychological subjugation. The main texts are The Castle of Otranto by Horace Walpole and Dracula by Bram Stoker. Both of these texts connect their castle to the feudal system and ideas of fear and entrapment. Subsidiary texts are The Fall of the House of Usher, The Masque of the Red Death, and The Tell-Tale Heart by Edgar Allan Poe, and The Bloody Chamber, The Lady of the House of Love, and The Court of Mr. Lyon by Angela Carter. . These texts demonstrate that elements of my core texts are foundational to many other Gothic texts and draw comparisons and differences between them. Although only the Bloody Chamber technically recounts the events inside a castle, the rest include buildings in which similar events can be observed; these texts can certainly all be described as Gothic. The effect of the castle on the characters in these texts is always unfavorable, and whether the characters' perception is compromised by a supernatural fear instilled in them by the archaic setting or they feel barricaded in the paranoid recesses of their own minds, the castle increases all this. feelings with terrifying consequences. Castles of the Gothic genre are dominant structures. Dracula's castle is undoubtedly magnificent, and Harker notices upon arrival that it is in "the courtyard of a vast ruined castle" whose "broken battlements formed an irregular line against the moonlit sky." Walpole, in The Castle of Otranto (Otranto), is more subtle in his description of the scale of the castle, simply telling the reader that the "hundred gentlemen carrying an enormous sword" fit easily into the courtyard. Stoker uses the castle to frame his narrative, with each stone "articulated against the light of the setting sun", which revives the image created by "the moonlit sky" at the beginning of the novel. Both castles are complex structures: during Isabella's escape to Otranto, we discover that the castle is "hewn into several complex cloisters", which is very similar to Dracula's castle which contains "a dark passage resembling a tunnel”. It seems, however, that Stoker was more aware of the Gothic architectural tradition, as illustrated by expressions such as "climbing a grand spiral staircase" and "tall black windows". A sense of grandeur is typical of the Gothic: in Poe's short story The Masque of the Red Death (Masque) we see "a vast and magnificent structure" and the castle in Angela Carter's short story (Chamber) is "a mysterious and amphibious place, contravening the materiality of the earth and the waves”. This transcendental majesty takes a more reserved form in The Courtship of Mr. Lyons with "a miniature and perfect Palladian house which seemed tohide timidly behind the snowy skirts of an ancient cypress.” This trope of opulence is also implied in Poe's The Fall of the House of Usher when Usher points to "the enormous ancient panels". It is clear that if the writer wants to impress the reader with a building, it must be extraordinary, in its magnificence, complexity or beauty. This greatness promotes a feeling of insecurity as a great power can cause discomfort even in those who feel free. The primary function of a castle is to protect its inhabitants against enemy invasions. Dracula's Castle is located in a wild mountain fortress that was "built into the corner of a great rock, so that on three sides it was quite impregnable", making it extremely difficult to attack; the castle represents security. Safety is also a concern in Otranto as there is an underground passage leading to a nearby church, which proves to be a useful emergency exit. It is significant that Dracula is not defeated by Harker and his accomplices in his castle and that it is the walls, the main security elements of the castle of Otranto, which collapse upon Theodore's arrival. After analyzing other Gothic texts, it becomes even clearer that defense and strength are crucial facets of the castle: in Chamber, the walls of the torture chamber are "the bare rock" and the house in Courtship is " behind wrought iron gates. However, the tarn which covers the fragments of the "HOUSE OF USHER" is not the symbol of the fulfillment of a prophecy, as at Otranto, but of Usher's final descent into madness and ruin. . The castle is a solid structure, a symbol of power. , and therefore only the richest families could afford this kind of luxury. The hierarchy and the feudal system have an important role to play when we talk about the castle. It is also interesting to note that Stoker described Dracula as "the old medieval vampire but recrudescent today", while the novel Otranto purports to concern events occurring between 1095 and 1243; both novels are full of history. Count Dracula's face is described as "aquiline", implying noble heritage and this is emphasized by his self-identification as a "nobleman from Transylvania". Castle Dracula is a tangible part of this notion. Walpole goes even further in depicting the castle as a vestige of an aristocratic past with the prophetic line "That the castle and lordship of Otranto should pass from the present family, whenever the true owner should outgrow it." live” which is an integral part of the story. Lineage is essential in Otranto and this becomes abundantly clear when Theodore, Alfonso's descendant, who was poisoned by Manfred's grandfather, enters: "The walls of the castle behind Manfred were thrown down with mighty force, and the Alfonso's form, expanded to an immense size, appeared in the center of the ruins. “The collapsed walls symbolize Manfred's betrayal, but more importantly, the restoration of the true descendant. The ruin is monumental and therefore gives the impression of long-lost power, not to mention echoes of supernatural fears, while the survival of Castle Dracula makes it an ongoing threat. However, both are signs of the distant past and their property is vital to the characters, as demonstrated by Manfred first being "longing for his grandsons" and then later wanting to marry Isabella; the survival of the family, and the castle with it, is of the utmost importance. We see "the Romanian aristocracy" and "Vlad the Impaler" mentioned in Angela Carter's Lady of the House, and in the Room, thedining room is the one “where King Mark was reputed to have fed his knights”. ' . All these buildings are immersed in noble history and antiquity. The fact that these castles were once grandiose highlights how dilapidated they are today. In Dracula's castle, "the sculpture had been much worn by time and bad weather", but Walpole went so far as to collapse the castle of Otranto, due to past sins and the prospect of rejuvenation . The gothic trope of the new world versus the old world surfaces here. This can be read from a Marxist perspective: Karl Marx believed that cultures change between time zones and therefore there is a crisis of modernity because we are still obsessed with the past. This old order therefore causes anxiety in the present. In Dracula, Harker innocently represents modernity and the castle is in direct contrast to this; while in Otranto, the prophecy is born from the past although it is fulfilled in the present. Long ago, the castle would have been appreciated; now, especially with Dracula's castle, it's a huge threat. Other buildings in Gothic fiction conform to this notion: in Usher, “The fading of the ages had been great. Tiny mushrooms invaded the entire exterior, hanging in a thin tangled web from the eaves", while in Chamber, "the old name of this place is Murder Castle" and Lady's protagonist is surprised "to see how ruinous it is. the inside of the house was. The Marquis de Sade argued that the Gothic movement was the necessary art of a revolutionary age, but the argument that it arose from a general perception that all ancient structures were decaying is also true. The ruined landscape evokes both ruins and a glorious, powerful past, bringing together thousands of memories and stories into a single image. The purpose of a fortress is to prevent entry, but that also means it prevents egress. Jonathan Harker soon discovers that all exits to Dracula's castle are locked and that "the castle is a veritable prison and I am a prisoner." This sense of entrapment is reinforced by a description of the view from his window: he finds a "sense of freedom in the vast expanse" and this natural sublimity, along with the imposing architecture, highlights his plight. The word "jagged", used to describe battlements and a crest, may be linked to the vampires who live inside the castle. At Otranto, instead of the doors being locked, "several intricate cloisters", exacerbated by gusts of wind, make Isabella's escape difficult, although she manages to leave the castle more easily than Harker. But it is significant that she has to take refuge in a church and cannot go out; Claustrophobia, a feeling symptomatic of imprisonment, prevails here. All of these places place the reader in a trapping scenario; this feeling of vulnerability is disturbing because of the cathartic elaboration of the fears involved. It's obvious that the Gothic genre has a penchant for structures that enclose their inhabitants. In Chamber, Carter calls the castle a “pretty prison”; However, we must not forget that Carter, unlike the rest of the writers here, is a woman and so, due to the gothic trope of the woman trapped in the castle, it is possible that she is slightly more concerned with this theme. In Usher, the sentence "The windows were long, narrow and pointy, so far from the black oak floor that they were completely inaccessible from the inside" gives the impression of a room from which it is impossible to escape. escape. Lady, however, goes so far as to create a disturbing image of rosespushing into a wall “which encloses him in the castle of his inheritance”. These gothic trapping structures disconcert and terrify the characters and, through our empathy, us. We experience the same surprises and even the same desire for freedom, but with the assurance of being safe. Castles are mysterious places in which reality can sometimes be conquered by supernatural forces. However, the nature of these powers is remarkably different when comparing Otranto and Dracula. In Otranto there are many bizarre events: Conrad is "almost buried under a huge helmet", a statue's nose bleeds, and a giant foot and arm clad in armor appear inside the castle. Ghosts also have their part in the plot: a skeleton "wrapped in a hermit's hood" tells Frédéric to forget Mathilde. The fear of something lurking in a castle is a classic gothic trope. The reader's trust, and by extension the veracity of events, are contested much more rigorously in Dracula; instead of an omniscient narrator like Otranto's, Stoker uses an epistolary form with Harker's diary which is much more fallible. It's not so much the events at Castle Dracula that are supernatural, but rather the inhabitants themselves. Harker quickly realizes that he is "the only living soul in the place" and soon after is seduced by three vampires who do not seem confined by the physical limits of the castle: "they simply seemed to blend into the rays of the light of moon ". Likewise, Count Dracula lives on human blood, can only survive in the dark, has no reflection in mirrors, and is afraid of garlic and crucifixes. The vampire is a mythical phenomenon and therefore in Dracula the reader is invited not only to accept supernatural events, as in Otranto, but also to believe in them and fear them. Furthermore, it is worth noting that although in both novels the strange incidents do not only occur in the castle, they originate in these buildings. The majority of Gothic novels containing supernatural elements conform to Otranto in content, but not in form. Poe, in Usher, includes natural phenomena: "Suddenly a wild light flashed along the path, and I turned to see whence could have come such an unusual glow" which led to the collapse of the house. This short story is in the first person and the reader must therefore also question the fallibility of the narrator who could have been affected by Usher's madness. Tzvetan Todorov wrote about the unexplained supernatural, noting that a person who witnesses an event must choose between two solutions: either he is a victim of his imagination, or the event actually took place. This hesitation is the primary condition for the fantastic to anchor itself in our minds. However, what we should really be questioning is the impact that the prison condition of the castles and the supernatural elements within them have on the characters and the reader. Above all, the castle provokes terror and there is tension here because the castle is a physical object so in theory would be more associated with horror. Moreover, this terror leads to very similar consequences in Dracula and Otranto: Harker declares that the castle "frozen my heart and made my nerves tremble" and madly decides to "climb the castle wall further than I can reach." I tried again to escape; Isabella, after the death of her fiancé Conrad, flees her father, Manfred, through an underground passage. However, Harker also compares himself to a "rat...caught in a trap" and, in Otranto Bianca, after seeing a giant hand, declares "I will not sleep in the castle tonight." It is therefore obvious that it is not only theinhabitants of the castle who precipitate such fear, but also the resemblance of the castle to a prison and its supernatural facets. Why does the feeling of imprisonment and the existence of the supernatural in castles actually cause terror? The most obvious reason would be the fear of death: incarceration restricts our personal space and freedom, and inevitably refers to this primordial concern with our mortality. What the characters feel is essentially a claustrophobia which, if experienced continually, is extremely unsettling; it’s cathartic for the reader who feels trapped without any real physical imprisonment. Masque is an allegory of inevitable death as the characters are pursued by a stranger who kills them all. In almost all my texts there are deaths, and in my main texts there are several. Obviously, the feeling of being trapped inside such an enormous structure reinforces this feeling of helplessness, as the characters seem constantly in awe of their surroundings. Poe was fascinated by the idea of ​​being buried alive, which we see with the cataleptic Magdalene in Usher, and the panic felt inside the castle can be seen as an extension of this. This paranoia of being trapped with no escape is applicable to both Dracula and Otranto; without a lucky descent from a window and an underpass respectively, this would have been a reality. There is also the tension of events occurring against the characters' wishes, such as the giant's presence in Otranto, and it is significant that Dracula greets Harker with "Enter freely and of your own will! Although he arrives by choice, the protagonist is quickly disturbed by his environment This idea can be extended to sexuality: according to Freud, the sexual drive, Eros, is linked in an uncontrollable way to the death drive, Thanatos, and thus these two concepts of production and termination. of life are linked The vampires play with Harker's mind: he wants to remain faithful to Mina, but at the same time finds the creatures "voluptuous" the scene ends with the phrase "Then the horror conquered me; This challenges the stereotypical events that occur in a castle: usually the malevolent man (Manfred) puts the female protagonist (Isabella) in danger, causing her to flee and be pursued. Dark events can flourish because they are isolated from the outside world. Dracula, however, twists this concept by having the vampires try to overpower the male protagonist; the gender roles are reversed, illustrating another way in which Stoker unsettles both Harker and the reader. Castle also has an alarming propensity to affect sleep. The Count warns Harker “that if you leave these rooms, you will under no circumstances sleep in any other part of the castle. It is old and contains many memories, and there are bad dreams for those who sleep recklessly. » The danger lurking in the castle is a quintessential Gothic trope and Harker disobeys the Count; he writes "The feeling of sleep was upon me", which leads to his encounter with the vampires. It is clear that the castle challenges the liminal state of dream and reality. Harker, upon seeing them, remarks, "At that moment I thought I must be dreaming when I saw them" and throughout his stay at Castle Dracula, he is never sure if what he is seeing is real. In Otranto, however, the general aura of realism is retained, even if it is intermittently tested by various events: "'What, isn't it Alphonse?' cried Manfred, “don’t you see it? Could this be my brain going crazy? - 'This! my lord, said Hippolita, here is Theodore, the young man who was sounhappy... “Theodore, or ghost, he disturbed Manfred's soul. » Here, Manfred cannot believe his eyes and it seems that the supernatural and dramatic events, facilitated by the castle, have begun to overwhelm him. Bianca, after seeing a hand, exclaims: "I will not sleep in the castle tonight" and so it seems that in Otranto sleep is disturbed, but that in Dracula we do not know if we are conscious or No. Harker writes, "I began to rub my eyes and pinch myself to see if I was awake," then he realized that everything "felt like a horrible nightmare." The imposing building terrorizes him because it makes reality extremely blurry. It is also notable that Madeleine in Usher is cataleptic and so the connection between sleep and death is established when she is buried and returns. The darkness, an aspect so inherent to the Gothic, also helps the castle slowly enslave the characters. It represents the uncertain, the unknown and the intimidating. Otranto's "long labyrinth of darkness" is linked to the terrible workings of Manfred's mind. This draws a parallel with Poe's The Tell-Tale Heart in which the narrator describes his victim's room "black as pitch with thick darkness", which can also be read as a reference to the dark recesses of his own mad mind . We must also remember that Count Dracula can only thrive on light. Hippolita assures Manfred that “the vision of the gigantic leg and foot was only a fable; and no doubt an impression made by fear and the dark and dreary hour of night upon the minds of his servants. Darkness is represented here as something that can bear witness to these horrible visions. This psychological disorientation is reinforced by the size of the castle. Both Castle Dracula and Castle Otranto are enormous, giving the impression that they have unlimited boundaries: this threatens the characters with problems of size and order and, according to Freud, in his book An Overview of psychoanalysis, brings to the surface previously repressed childhood fears. The deep paranoia of Harker and Manfred, regardless of their clairvoyance, bears witness to this. There is tension here because once inside the castle it can be very claustrophobic. The phallic appearance of Gothic towers has long been a component of horror symbolism; the height of the tower makes it easier to conquer the minds of the characters. The loneliness felt adds another dimension. Added to this is the complete change of setting for Harker as he finds himself, like the protagonist of Chamber, in an exotic country of Transylvania. He soon realizes that “there were no servants in the house” and finds this solitude disturbing: “I start from my own shadow and I am full of all kinds of horrible imaginations.” The Count leaves him alone to ruminate and this isolation, like that of Usher who lived alone for a long time due to Madeleine's condition, begins to make him paranoid. Isabelle is also overcome by fear, exacerbated by the terrifying labyrinth: “all these thoughts crowded into her distracted mind, and she was ready to sink under her apprehensions”. Nerves and loneliness play an important role in the development of the majority of the characters in these gothic novels. From a psychological point of view, the castle symbolizes man's natural fear of being incarcerated in his own mind. As human beings, we create social networks and situations that we sometimes cannot escape. We are tempted by base desires and we often give in to them; Harker can't help but fall asleep in front of his room and realizes his mistake the next day when the vampires want to suck his blood. In Chamber, the same scenario occurs when the Marquis. (2001).