Silence Of The Lambs Robin Wood Analysis

Silence of the Lambs” (1988) and “American Psycho” (1991), how Gumb is a ‘classical monster’. In his analysis of horror, Robin Wood states how monsters of this genre are the “actual dramatization of the dual concept of the repressed or the ‘other’ ”. She goes on to state how the oppression of our civilization resurfaces as an object of horror and how order is restored only by annihilating the repressed object. In his usage of ‘otherness’, Wood constantly refers to sexual otherness through deviation of apparently normal sexual norms. Gumb blurs the line between sexual binaries, more so because he is not a transsexual and hence caters to no sexual norm and represents no clear sexual identity and it is his lack of ‘normality’ that turns him into

This consumption of the painting captures the nature of his obsessive misogyny resulting from his childhood memories of abuse and domination. He clearly sees himself as the Red Dragon of Blake’s painting, The Great Red Dragon and the Woman Clothed with the Sun, and his female victims as the avatars of the woman. On one of his army trips to London, Dolarhyde gets the Red Dragon tattooed on his back and gets a false pair of teeth for his murders which are based on the mould of his grandmother’s teeth. It is his memories of his childhood days of abuse, initially from his grandmother and later from his estranged mother and her husband that provokes his misogyny. He was made to believe that he was not wanted and this led to his wanting to “become” the Dragon who, he believed, was a hub of power. It is his ultimate obsession with wanting to control the world in his way that hastens his doom. He, like JameGumb, in the process of proving his worth, gets transformed into a monster. We can trace the reason for their transformations on their desire to prove themselves to the world and it is this transformed self that empowers them to do so. Dr. Henry Jekyll conducts a scientific experiment to prove to the world and his fellow scientist his faith in transcendental studies. It

Nicholas M. Williams, in his essay, ‘Eating Blake, or an Essay on Taste: The Case of Thomas Harris’s “Red Dragon”’, mentions how Dolarhyde’s consumption of Blake’s art is not to be seen as “becoming similar to Blake” or even an attempt to do so. Instead, it must be read as a transgressive act, a “despoiling” of the high-art text for the purposes of creating a new art. This consumption of art can be equated with Hannibal Lecter’s cannibalism where he consumes the rude or the offender in his own sophisticated manner and feeds on them with aromatic herbs. The cannibalistic trait can be traced in Stevenson’s text where Dr.Jekyll allows his civilized self to be consumed by the “spirit of hell” in him, so much so that, “That child of Hell had nothing human; nothing lived in him but fear and hatred”(71). Williams, in his essay, further goes on to explore how the background of Dolarhyde’s murders is not irrelevant in this regard because in the crosscutting between the FBI investigation and everyday circumstances of him, we come across a picture of an unexceptional individual, whose only abnormality is his oral irregularities that merely mark him as physically flawed. Nicholas mentions how “Thomas Harris makes film and