Introduction

What is the Gothic?

The Gothic is an form of architecture, music, fashion, and as we know it most today: literature. In literature form the Gothic appears as magnificent tales, hero's disguised as peasants, prophets hiding away in a cave, and hauntingly beautiful jagged mountains and castles. If there is a hero, there more than likely a damsel in distress waiting somewhere for him to save her.

Imagine the typical damsel in distress. She is locked into a Disney movie tower somewhere far away, or bit in the neck by a vampire, screaming and helpless. The history of the damsel is not a positive one, these women were seen as weak, and never able to make their own choices. This is the Gothic; women must fall, fail, or suffer for men to rise.

Dracula by Bram Stoker is a fantastic example of this fallen woman.  Here the damsels in distress are figuratively raped, shamed as sluts for sexuality, or like the harpies, act purely on sexual desires. They also faint, scream, and cry. Imagine these women as tumbling down a staircase from beautiful and chaste to sinful and unwanted.

 In Dracula, Mina and Lucy are two women attacked by Count Dracula. On pg 389, Mina Harker is figuratively raped by Count Dracula in this key passage:

"With his left hand he held both Mrs. Harkers hands, keeping them away with her arms at full tension his right hand gripped her by the back of the neck, forcing her face down on his bosom."

It is what we expect of a damsel, and we love what we expect because it is familiar to us. This project explores The Walking Dead character Lori Grimes' life where she is often a damsel, and she does many things we wouldn't expect a woman in her situation to do. Lori is important because she does not follow the cliche, and strangely, it makes us hate her.

In the Gothic there is also a theme of the fallen woman. She is not the damsel who is saved by the prince, she is the beautiful young lady who makes choices that we don't agree with. We vilify her for these and put her to a standard, she is likely to have commit a sexual 'sin'. For Lori, it is a rocky tumble down to the bottom, bombarded with hate from her protagonist husband who as a standard to all other characters in The Walking Dead.

The purpose of this blog is to show the life of Lori Grimes through the zombie apocalypse and to understand that just because she doesn't fit the mold of the damsel in distress or the fallen woman, that doesn't mean she is always wrong. The "Annotated Bibliography" page explores the many points where Lori makes choices we don't agree with, and the "Conclusions" page sums them up and explains what they really mean for Lori as a person. If you are interested in knowing more about me and why I chose to review Lori, the "About the Author" page goes into this in depth.


Bram Stoker. The New Annotated Dracula. New York, 2008. Print.