TY - CHAP
T1 - Liz Lochhead and the Gothic
AU - Poore, Benjamin
PY - 2013/3
Y1 - 2013/3
N2 - Liz Lochhead’s version of Dracula is now over a quarter of a century old. It has, since its premiere at the Royal Lyceum, Edinburgh, become something of a classic stage adaptation of the novel. Critical analysis of Lochhead’s Dracula has tended to present the play as a feminist critique of patriarchal repression: Bram Stoker’s nineteenth-century perspective ‘is replaced by a twentieth-century female writer’s view that Dracula liberated his victims from their sexual and psychological repressions induced by a patriarchal culture and its dominant religion, Christianity’ (McDonald and Harvie 1993: 130). However, this chapter will argue that Lochhead’s Dracula offers another Freudian re-reading of Stoker’s novel, one that is in some ways antithetical to the popular, familiar themes of repression and liberation: the uncanny. Freud’s celebrated essay, ‘The Uncanny’ (1919) draws on the literary example of E.T.A. Hoffmann’s ‘The Sandman’ to explore experiences of otherness, déjà vu, doubles, trance states, and being buried alive. It seems tailor-made as an analytical approach to Stoker’s Dracula (1897), where the vampire is a creature both alive and dead (‘un-dead’, in Stoker’s coinage), and who can transform his victims into ghoulish, murderous doubles of their living selves. The double, in a much-quoted gloss on Freud, ‘is paradoxically both a promise of immortality ... and a harbinger of death’ (Bennett and Royle 1999: 41), and this is what the vampire, too, offers. Furthermore, this chapter will demonstrate that Lochhead’s adaptation, through its rearrangement of character patterns, creates new uncanny doubles. In the second half of the chapter, I will use this sense of the uncanny to explore what could be regarded as Gothic elements which lurk even in Lochhead’s more naturalistic recent writing for the theatre.
AB - Liz Lochhead’s version of Dracula is now over a quarter of a century old. It has, since its premiere at the Royal Lyceum, Edinburgh, become something of a classic stage adaptation of the novel. Critical analysis of Lochhead’s Dracula has tended to present the play as a feminist critique of patriarchal repression: Bram Stoker’s nineteenth-century perspective ‘is replaced by a twentieth-century female writer’s view that Dracula liberated his victims from their sexual and psychological repressions induced by a patriarchal culture and its dominant religion, Christianity’ (McDonald and Harvie 1993: 130). However, this chapter will argue that Lochhead’s Dracula offers another Freudian re-reading of Stoker’s novel, one that is in some ways antithetical to the popular, familiar themes of repression and liberation: the uncanny. Freud’s celebrated essay, ‘The Uncanny’ (1919) draws on the literary example of E.T.A. Hoffmann’s ‘The Sandman’ to explore experiences of otherness, déjà vu, doubles, trance states, and being buried alive. It seems tailor-made as an analytical approach to Stoker’s Dracula (1897), where the vampire is a creature both alive and dead (‘un-dead’, in Stoker’s coinage), and who can transform his victims into ghoulish, murderous doubles of their living selves. The double, in a much-quoted gloss on Freud, ‘is paradoxically both a promise of immortality ... and a harbinger of death’ (Bennett and Royle 1999: 41), and this is what the vampire, too, offers. Furthermore, this chapter will demonstrate that Lochhead’s adaptation, through its rearrangement of character patterns, creates new uncanny doubles. In the second half of the chapter, I will use this sense of the uncanny to explore what could be regarded as Gothic elements which lurk even in Lochhead’s more naturalistic recent writing for the theatre.
KW - Uncanny
KW - Scottish Gothic
KW - Lochhead
KW - Dracula
M3 - Chapter
SN - 9780748654727
SN - 9780748654710
T3 - Edinburgh Companions to Scottish Literature
SP - 86
EP - 104
BT - The Edinburgh Companion to Liz Lochhead
A2 - Varty, Anne
PB - Edinburgh University Press
CY - Edinburgh
ER -