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| A 2010 comedy based on the Burke and Hare murders--commemorated in the story, "The Victim" |
For Wednesday: From Polidori’s The Vampire and Other Tales of the Macabre: Bulwer, “Monos and Daimonos” (53-61), Anonymous, “The Victim” (87-98), “Life in Death” (130-137). Note—you can read “The Curse” instead of “Life in Death” if you wish, or if you already read it.
Answer TWO
of the following:
Q1: In “The
Victim,” the doctor examines the young woman’s corpse and claims the sight “afforded
me a pleasure, so mixed up with all that was horrid, that I sincerely hope it
will never fall to my lot to have a second experience of that same feeling”
(92). Nevertheless, he feels impelled to kiss the corpse as well. Why do so
many of these stories linger of the vision of a female corpse (we saw this in The Vampyre, too)? Why show this to the
reader?
Q2: How
does one or more of these stories create the Gothic device of “based upon a
true story” in its narrative? What elements strike a reader (esp. of this time)
as too specific to be made up? Also, how might the author exploit sensibility
(strong emotion) to confuse the fictional nature of the story?
Q3: The
story, “Monos and Daimonos” is a classic story of a doppleganger, or double. The word “monos” means “single” and “daimonos”
means demon/spirit, though both words are curiously similar (“Daimonos”
contains “monos”). How might the two characters in the story be linked, and how
does the author suggest that there is only one
person throughout?
Q4: Two of
these stories are by anonymous writers, which is curious, since authorship wasn’t
especially taboo and many writers made their fame through publishing in
fashionable Gothic journals such as Blackwood’s
or New Monthly Magazine. Why
might an author have decided to suppress his or her identity with these
particular stories? What might they have been hiding…and why might there have
been more anonymous stories in the 19th century than in the 20th?
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