Totem and Taboo Critical Essays - eNotes.com.
G othic thrives on transgression: incest, rape, perversion, crime, insanity, and death are prominent themes within the Gothic tradition, which embodies an obsession with the darker side of human life. The recurrent violation of taboos represented in Gothic fiction is closely tied to its primary strategy of evoking terror and fear in the recipient.
In “The Fall of the House of Usher” Poe explores such topics as incest, terminal illness, mental breakdown, and death. As is typical of the gothic genre, the story is set in a dark, medieval castle, and uses a first-person narrator to introduce a sense of dread and terror in the reader.
The Pros and Cons of Abortion. 1190 words (5 pages) Essay in English Literature.. How could you force a 12 year old girl who is a victim of incest to have that baby? It is difficult and maybe impossible to justify saving a life of a child that will be a constant reminder of the horror she was put through at such a young age. At 12, you are.
This detailed literature summary also contains Topics for Discussion and a Free Quiz on Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection by Julia Kristeva. Kristeva examines the notion of abjection—the repressed and literally unspeakable forces that linger inside a person's psyche—and traces the role the abject has played in the progression of history, especially in religion.
Powers of Horros: An Essay on Abjection. New York: Columbia University Press, 1982.Creed, Barbara. “Horror and the Monstrous-Feminine: An Imaginary Abjection.” Screen 27 (1) January-February (1986), pp. 44-54. Abjection is the defensive reaction of repulsion when the subject is forced to confront to (false) construction of the self.
The incest theme in both texts portrays a profoundly disturbing social disharmony, where kings commit murder, incest, violate the structures of society and debase themselves to the laws of animals. This view of degeneration and conflict is clearly incompatible with a notion of the late plays as being transcendental or sublime.
In One Hundred Years of Solitude, love and lust are inextricably tangled: familial love is confused with sexual love, husbands and wives have so little sexual chemistry that they must satisfy their urges with other partners, and the parentage of many characters is kept secret, heightening the risk of incest. These complicated circumstances are caused by the characters’ misplaced dedication.