A2 English Literature Gothic Key Quotes

This is my list of quotes that I made for cramming literally a few days before the exam!

I just tried to find the most flexible, useful quotes I could that addressed most of the key Gothic themes.

They're not everything you need and I avoided most of the 'mainstream' quotes that I already knew ("Is this a dagger I see before me?" etc. - which are still very useful and not to be underestimated), but this list is great if you're really short on time! I prioritised Frankenstein and Wuthering Heights as my potential Part A texts so there's more quotes for those books.

Enjoy!

Frankenstein

• like one doomed by slavery to toil in the mines (immorality of work)
• a place befitting such work (Orkney islands, setting)
• desolate and appalling landscape (Orkney islands, setting)
• new and unlimited powers (scientific ambition)
• command the thunders of heaven  (scientific ambition)
• in a scientific pursuit there is continual food for discovery and wonder  (scientific ambition)
• the tortures of the accursed did not equal mine; she was sustained by justice (Victor's bias)
• had I right, for my own benefit, to inflict this curse upon everlasting generations? (morality)
• I fell, never, never again to rise (Victor, damnation)
• Oh Frankenstein! Generous and self-devoted being! (Creature's sorrow at Victor's death, regret)
• I ought to be thy Adam, but I am rather the fallen angel (heaven/hell, creation)
• his soul is as hellish as his form, full of treachery and fiendlike malice (appearance showing character)
• my unhappy victim (Victor about Creature, responsibility)
• Satan has his companions, fellow-devils, to admire and encourage him; but I am alone and detested (Creature, isolation)
• do you share my madress? Have you drunk also of the intoxicating draught? (Victor, insanity)
• Elizabeth was of a calmer and more concentrated disposition (women)
• I looked upon crime as a distant evil; benevolence and generosity were ever present before me (nature vs nuture, Creature's initially benevolence)
• evil thenceforth became my good (good/evil, nature vs nuture)
• a serpent to sting you, as mine has been (forbidden knowledge)
• believes his native town to be the world (safety of ignorance)
• aspires to become greated than his nature will allow (forbidden knowledge, ambition)
• beware, for I am fearless and therefore powerful (fear, power, role reversal)
• devil...do you dare approach me? Begone, vile insect! (Victor to creature, nature vs nurture)
• the first hapless victims to my unhallowed arts (forbiddden knowledge, sin, responsibility)
• I saw, by the light of the moon, the demon at the casement (supernatural)
• chord after chord was sounded and soon my mind was filled with one thought, one conception, one purpose (obsession, ambition)
• when I thought of him, I gnashed my teeth, my eyes became inflamed (similarities between Victor and Creature)
• seems still to have the power of elevating his soul from earth (transcendence, power of nature)
• my spirits were elevated by the enchanting appearance of nature (transcendence, power of nature)

Wuthering Heights

• one bitter whirl of wind and suffocating snow (setting)
• her spirit has taken the post of ministering angel (spirituality, heaven)
• my fingers closed on the fingers of a little, ice-cold hand! (horror, supernatural)
• intense horror of nightmare came over me (horror)
• terror made me cruel (fear, morality)
• rubbed it to and fro until the blood ran down and soaked the bed clothes (horror, violence, blood)
• uncontrollable passion of tears (extreme emotions)
• snow and wind whirled wildly through (pathetic fallacy)
• as dark almost as if it came from the devil (racism, sin)
• would it not be a kindness to the country to hang him at once, before he shows his nature in acts, as well as features? (appearance reflecting character)
• fine clothes and flattery (civilisation)
• instead of a wild, hatless little savage (wild, free, emotions)
• I wish I had light hair and a fair skin, and was dressed, and behaved as well and had a chance of being as rich as he will be! (class, race, wealth)
• never had power to conceal her passion (extreme emotions)
• irresistibly impelled by the naughty spirit within her (extreme emotion)
• double assault of falsehood and violence that his idol had committed (violence, sin, idolisation)
• he possessed the power to depart, as much as a cat possesses the power to leave a mouse half-killed, or a bird half-eaten (love, obsession, idolisation)
• he's doomed, and flies to his fate! (love, damnation)
• with the help of Satan, I will make you swallow the carving-knife (images of horror, cruelty, religion)
• heaven did not seem to be my home (religion)
• growling thunder (patheticl fallacy)
• the storm came [...] in full fury (pathetic fallacy)
• it was nothing less than murder [...] to stand up and contradict her rages (uncontrollable emotions, anger, morality)
• it was not the thorn bending to the honeysuckle, but the honeysuckles embracing the thorn (pastoral metaphor, love, violence)
• the gunpowder lay as harmless as sand, because no fire came near to explode it (metaphor, uncontrollable emotions, anger)
• your presence is a moral poison that would contaminate the most virtuous (morality)
• painting on its white the colours of the rainbow (domestic violence, metaphor, horror)
• Mrs Linton, the lady of Thrushcross Grande and the wife of a stranger, an exile and outcast (isolation, class, civilisation)
• I wish I were a girl again, half savage and hardy, and free (wild)
• while you are at peace I shall writhe in the torments of hell (attitudes towards death, death as freedom)
• we'll see if one tree doesn't grow as crooked as the other, with the same wind to twist it! (nature vs nurture)
• as his nephew resembled him in person, he would resemble him in mind (appearance vs character)
• smiling sweet as honey (peace)
• two such radiant counterances (love)
• last night I was on the threshold of hell, today, I am in sight of my heaven (love, attitudes towards death, religion)
• under that benign sky (setting)
• imagine unquiet slumbers for the sleepers in that quiet earth (resolution (?), peace)

Macbeth

• nought's had, all's spent / where our desire is got without content / 'tis safer to be that which we destroy / than in destruction dwell in doubtful joy (regret, remorse, ambition)
• unnatural deeds / do breed unnatural troubles (immorality, psychological disturbance)
• I have almost forgot the taste of fears (unnatural, fear)
• but get thee back: my soul is too much charged / with blood of thine already (noble (?), morals, redemption?)
• life's but a walking shadow, a poor player / that struts and frets his hour upon the stage (attitudes towards life)
• my hands are of thy colour; but I shame / to wear a heart so white (cowardice, bravery, guilt, remorse, gender roles)
• upon my head they placed a fruitless crown / and put a barren sceptre in my gripe (monarchy, guilt, kingship)
• now I am cabined, cribbed, confined, bound in / to saucy doubts and fears (fear, paranoia, guilt)
• the very firstlings of my heart shall be / the firstlings of my hand (action, immorality)
• not in the legions / of horrid Hell can come a devil more damned / in evils to top Macbeth (damnation, sin, religion)
• O nation miserable, with an untitled tyrant, bloody-sceptred (kingship, sin, violence)
• before my body / I throw my warlike shield (defence or pride?, soldier, bravery)
• dead butcher and his fiend-like Queen (character types, tyranny)

(Note: I already knew a lot of the key parts of Macbeth from studying it at GCSE, so the vast majority of famous lines etc are not on this list)

The Bloody Chamber - The Bloody Chamber

• seventeen and knew nothing of the world (innocence, naivety, chronological change)
• only a baby (youth, innocence)
• dark leonine shape of his head (threatening male, animalistic)
• dark mane (animalistic)
• waxen face (unnatural, frightening)
• like an extraordinarily precious slit throat (beauty and pain, wealth, excess, violence)
• as if he were stripping the leaves off an artichoke (humour?, objectification, sex)
• instruments of mutilation (horror)
• gleamed as if they were sweating with fright (fear, tension)
• an armful of the same lilies with which he had filled my bedroom (sex and death)
• subterranean privacy (hell, underworld)
• my little nun (sex and religion, worship of sex)
• prayer-books (dark humour, sex and religion)

(Note: Again, these are only quotes for the opening of TBC - I knew most of the quotes from the end by this point!)

The Bloody Chamber - The Erl King

• the woods enclose, then enclose again, like a system of Chinese boxes (entrapment, lost, mystery, tension)
• the Erl King will do you grievous harm (isolated line, tension, danger, foreshadowing)
• he is the tender butcher who showed me that the price of flesh is love; skin the rabbit, he says! (objectification, violence and sex)
• I feel your sharp teeth in the subaqueous depths of your kisses (violence and sex, animalistic)
• how sweet I roamed, or rather, used to roam (lost innocence)
• his touch both consoles and devastates me (oxymoronic, lust, love, fear)
• I feel my heart pulse, then wither (love and death)
• eyes as green as apples. Green as dead sea fruit. (danger, death, natural world)
• his embraces were his enticements, and yet, oh yet! they were the branches of which the trap itself was woven (entrapment, male dominance, danger, tension)
• then she will open all the cages (freedom, escape)
• I will strangle him (strength, danger, tension, violence, role reversal)
• each with the crimson imprint of his love-bite on their throats (violence and sex, ownership, scarring)

The Bloody Chamber - The Lady of the House of Love

• my darkness (nature, sin, darkness)
• I thought, perhaps, you might irradiate it (love, light, purity, darkness)
• immune to shadow, due to his virginity (purity, innocence, virginity)
• the blood on the Countess' face will be mixed with tears (moral conflict, danger, emotional anguish)
• the bridegroom bleeds on my inverted marriage bed (role reversal, gender roles, blood, sex and death)
• their swooning odour, that breathes lasciviously of forbidden pleasures (excess, sex)
• too many shadows (darkness, menace)
• now you are at the place of annihilation (danger, tension)
• both death and the maiden (mixed characterisation, oxymoronic)
• beautiful and ghastly lady (mixed characterisation, oxymoronic)
• I am condemned to solitude and dark; I do not mean to hurt you (nature vs nuture, damnation)
• two-wheeled symbol of rationality vanish into the dark entrails of the mansion (rationality against supernatural, occult)
• no-man's land between life and death, sleeping and waking (liminal state)
• I will vanish in the morning light; I was only an invention of darkness (darkness, supernatural, mystery, transformation)

A2 English Literature Gothic Questions (LITB3)

All AQA English Literature A2 (LITB3) questions from 2010 to 2014, including Specification questions.

Year	Frankenstein	Bloody Chamber	Wuthering Heights	Macbeth	Part B	Part B	Part B
June 2014	To what extent do you agree with the view that the novel is a total condemnation of transgression?	“Sex and violence are always linked in the stories of The Bloody Chamber” To what extent do you agree with this view?	“In Wuthering Heights love is presented as an emotion which provokes violence rather than tenderness.” To what extent do you agree with this view?	How far do you agree with the view that Macbeth is a very moral play about the punishment of sin?	“Gothic writing is exciting because it allows us to think the unthinkable.” How far do you agree with this view?	To what extent do you think gothic writing is a disturbing exploration of the unknown?	To what extent do you agree with the view that gothic writing shows that human beings are naturally inclined to be evil rather than good?
June 2013	Explore some of the ways in which Mary Shelley uses different settings to contribute to the gothic effects of the novel.	“It is ironic that the beasts are often more humane than the humans.” Consider TBC in the light of this comment.	How far do you agree with the view that, in Wuthering Heights, Emily Brontë shows that more suffering is caused by a diseased mind than by a diseased body?	“Macbeth is a play about the nature of evil rather than the nature of ambition.” To what extent do you agree with this view of the play?	To what extent do you agree that, in gothic writing, fear and pain are sources of pleasure?	“Mad, bad and dangerous.” How accurate is this as a description of the gothic villains in the texts you have studied?	How do you respond to the view that gothic writing explores potential threats to normal values?
January 2013	“Throughout the novel the boundaries between good and evil are continuously blurred, leaving the reader with moral uncertainty.” How far do you agree with this view of the novel?	“Although terrifying, many of the stories are also darkly comic.” Consider TBC in the light of this comment.	Consider the view that Wuthering Heights is, above all, an exploration of fear.	“Some say he’s mad; others, that lesser hate him, Do call it valiant fury.” (Caithness: Act 5, Scene 2) Consider Macbeth as a gothic protagonist in the light of this comment	“In gothic writing, the presentation of places is often more interesting than the presentation of characters.” How far do you agree with this view?	To what extent do you agree with the view that gothic writing is “an exploration of what cannot be explained”?	Consider the significance of forms of entrapment in gothic literature
June 2012	How do you respond to the view that the Monster is Frankenstein’s double, representing the evil side of his character?	How do you respond to the view that in the stories in The Bloody Chamber Angela Carter presents a sinister distortion of family relationships?	“Entrapped, imprisoned and disempowered.” To what extent do you agree with this view of the position of women in Wuthering Heights?	Consider the significance of darkness and concealment to the play.	“Gothic writing warns of the dangers of aspiring beyond our limitations” How far does your reading of gothic writing support this view?	To what extent do you agree that obsession is a significant element in the gothic writing you have studied?	How do you respond to the idea that gothic villains make evil seem attractive?
January 2012	In an introduction to the novel Mary Shelley stated that she wished to “curdle the blood and quicken the beatings of the heart”. To what extent do you think she achieves her aims?	“Carter explores base instincts rather than subconscious desires.” Consider TBC in the light of this comment.	How far do you agree with the view that in Wuthering Heights more suffering is inflicted by mental cruelty than physical cruelty?	How do you respond to the view that the supernatural elements in Macbeth represent Macbeth’s own internal struggles?	To what extent do you agree with the view that, in gothic writing, death is the punishment for sin?	“Gothic literature demonstrates the consequences of disrupting the natural order of things”	“Gothic writing lacks tension and suspense because the end is always inevitable” To what extent do you agree with this?
June 2011	Some readers have seen the novel as an illustration of the fear of the power of science. To what extent do you agree with this view of the novel?	In The Bloody Chamber Angela Carter reverses gothic traditions so that the males become the victims instead of the females. Consider TBC in the light of this view.	Charlotte Bronte described Heathcliff as ‘a man’s shape animated by demon life - a ghoul.’ To what extent do you think this is an accurate assessment of the ways in which Heathcliff is presented in the novel?	How far do you agree that Lady Macbeth is presented as a ‘fiend-like queen’?	Consider the ways in which gothic writing could be said to explore the fear of forces beyond human understanding.	“For writers in the gothic tradition, the struggle between good and evil is always of central importance and good is rarely victorious” How far do you agree with this view?	“Gothic writing is often unintentionally comic rather than truly terrifying” To what extent do you agree with this criticism?
January 2011	To what extent do you agree with the view that, in Frankenstein. Mary Shelley is exploring the dark side of the human psyche?	Many readers have been shocked by the stories in The Bloody Chamber. Do you find them merely shocking?	‘Violence breeds violence.’ In the light of this comment, consider Emily Bronte’s presentation of violence in the novel.	What do you think is the significance of the witches in Macbeth?	“A melodramatic genre, where extremes of emotion have disastrous consequences” How far do you agree with this view of the gothic tradition?	Consider the view that literature within the gothic is always shocking	“Characters in gothic writing are haunted by their past mistakes and often have to face terrible consequences” Discuss some of the characters you have studied in light of this comment.
June 2010					“Religion is central to readings of Gothic texts” How far do you agree?	Consider the view that gothic writing explores the ‘nightmarish terrors’ that lie beneath the orderly surface of the ‘civilised mind’	“In gothic writing, women are presented as either innocent victims or sinister predators or significantly absent”. Consider the place of women in gothic writing in the light of this comment.
January 2010					To what extent is gothic literature characterised by a fascination with death?	“Gothic settings are desolate, alienating and full of menace”. Consider some of the ways in which writers use settings in the Gothic texts you have read.	Consider the view that gothic writing often explores the powerlessness of humanity when faced with the power of the supernatural.
Spec					“Gothic texts show the supernatural entwined with the ordinary” Discuss this view.	“Gothic literature is concerned with the breaking of normal moral and social codes” Discuss.	“If a text is to be labelled as gothic, it must convey a sense of fear and terror” Discuss.