Gap Between Literary Gothic and Pornography - 1719 Words

As a society, we are confronted daily with pornographic images, they feature in our newspapers, on our film screens, and even in our novels. This voyeuristic obsession the media holds has for a long time been desensitizing us to depictions of violence and sex, but has it also disabled us in being able to see the difference between what is carefully constructed satire and what is merely pornography? There is probably no text this discussion embraces more in modern gothic literature than that of Brett Easton Ellis’ American Psycho. The novel was surrounded with controversy, ecen before its publication in 1991. Originally, cited to be published by Simon Schuster, the company forfeited from the engagement, including its  £300,000†¦show more content†¦The sexual control of women by men is a major system within pornography, but it is not achieved through the same extreme level of violence used by Bateman, ‘in my locker in the locker room at Xclusive lie three vagin as I recently sliced out of various women I’ve attacked in the past week.’ Under his psychopathic control body parts cease to contain any sign of female sexuality or personal identity and instead they become ‘trophies’ of his violent sexual encounters. The image of the disembodied vagina acts to cause an extreme level of shock and horror within the reader, and it is not an image that stands alone within the book. These highly disturbing scenes of sexual violence against women surpass that of pornography, this does not account the novel as being a particularly horrifying piece of pornography, but instead it sets the novel from pornography completely. In order to understand this, we must consider that not all of society receives pornography in such a negative matter as so far discussed, for many people pornography is a private matter that is for the purpose of arousal. Therefore in order for the gap between American Psycho and pornography to be truly irrelevant, the text would have needed to be produced for the purpose of arousal. Although there are some scenes that explicitly serve as seeming only pornographic, the level of the violence coupled with sexual acts that progresses in