LJUDSKI PORIVI I (DE)STEREOTIPIZACIJA U NOVELAMA ENGLESKE GOTIKE
HUMAN NEEDS, AND (DE)STEREOTYPING IN ENGLISH GOTHIC NOVELS

Summary/Abstract: By analyzing people’s behavior and then reducing the socio-psychological complexity of existence and actions to the basic “triggers” of cognitive and emotional reactions, message creators establish and spread policies of consumerism and conformity. In the modern world, which is characterized by a pluralism of ideological, political, and ethical beliefs, but with constant market competition and the imperative of profit as one of the basic motives of all activities, the mass media primarily fulfill the tasks of increasing viewership/readership, as well as shaping the worldview and needs of their audience. (Boskovic et al., 2012:128-129). The aim of this work is to expand the scientific and social discussion about the impact of art on the public, first of all. Analyzing the authentic representatives of the English Gothic novels, we tried to point out how the writers of that time, through the construction of characters, plots, even specific architecture and interiors, tried to broadcast a personal view of the reality of that time, even reflecting their conscious or unconscious self in certain interrelationships in the stories. Gothic, as a term for very authentic architecture, a style of clothing, and a period in the rule of the aristocracy, is also an unquestionable pillar on which the themes of sexuality, terror, fear, and freedom (of authentic thoughts and living) were further elaborated. As in media theories, so above all in psychology and social psychology, it was necessary to determine what is moral and what is unacceptable and deviant. Through different historical periods, unwritten norms changed, most often based on institutional or non-institutional influence that in that period had primacy over society (royal families, church, parliament), about what is socially desirable behavior. By defining what was acceptable and what was deviant, politics, religion, and economics could manipulate human emotions and needs, encouraging them or suppressing them. While on the one hand religion, criminal law, and unwritten customs define sexually desirable behavior and gender roles (women above all), on the other hand it is the media and advertising that use and exploit this topic abundantly, for the needs of consumerism and circulation. A significant number of philosophical and psychological analyzes and discussions about Gothic literature have shown that the works of this direction are not mere and empty “entertainment,” as the majority of film and literary works of horror or erotic themes try to simplify and present. It is Sedgwick who points out that “by calling the Gothic halfway to becoming a language or imagining it to be a crypt, they provoke our curiosity as to what threshold the Gothic raises or what lies in its darkness.” (Sedgwick, 1981: 263). Exactly what we suppress and avoid thinking about because it is “immoral,” “perverse,” or scary, we look for and are provided in literature by artists who either enter the depth and essence of life and relationships or “play” on simple marketing of “forbidden fruit.”Gothic substance is a thing whose materiality is sublimated into freedom from all conditioning factors, making it simultaneously madness, dream, and play. (Brown, 1987:277). Gothic is permeated with elements of the reality of the time, as well as imagination, and in the descriptions of this style, the focus is on fiction, the unreal, and even the perverted. Criticizing the aristocracy, closed in its castles and with secrets that the people could only guess, Gothic literature abundantly described freedom from slavery and imposed rules, through entering the walls and moving sexual tendencies, incest, and female oppression into stories on the edge of reality and fiction.

• Details
• Contents