Gothic elements and Looking at the character of Mephistopheles

To begin with we looked at what we believe to be the elements of the gothic. I feel that in fiction the term gothic can be applied to a novel or play if the story emphasises on that of the grotesque, mysterious and desolate. According to a glossary term of gothic fiction this is what they believe gothiic elements include these:

• Ancient prophecy, especially mysterious, obscure, or hard to understand.
• Mystery and suspense
• High emotion, sentimentalism, but also pronounced anger, surprise, and especially terror
• Supernatural events (e.g. a giant, a sighing portrait, ghosts or their apparent presence, a skeleton)
• Omens, portents, dream visions
• Fainting, frightened, screaming women
• Women threatened by powerful, impetuous male
• Setting in a castle, especially with secret passages
• The metonymy of gloom and horror (wind, rain, doors grating on rusty hinges, howls in the distance, distant sighs, footsteps approaching, lights in abandoned rooms, gusts of wind blowing out lights or blowing suddenly, characters trapped in rooms or imprisoned)
• The vocabulary of the gothic (use of words indicating fear, mystery, etc.: apparition, devil, ghost, haunted, terror, fright)             

      

After discussing what we believed to be the elements of the Gothic we started to look at the character of Mephistopheles who is introduced to us in Act 1 Scene 3. To be honest I was surprised by him as although being a messenger of the devil he didn't appear to be very evil, weird... In fact he was very honest as he tells Faustus how hell is not a nice place and even admits that God is more poweful then Lucifer. He even sounds quite human especially compared to Faustus who is so self-absorbed he doesn't see why there is a problem with him wanting to sell his soul to the devil, how dumb can you get?? I think that in all this is a nice little twist Marlowe has going on as it's not a cliche and is very unexpected, I aprove. On the other hand I suppose that Mephistopheles could just be cunning and trying to set the audience on edge creating the atmosphere of suspense and terror. Although this may be the case I have always tried to see the good and people and hope that Mephistopheles is what he appears, I suppose we will just have to read on to find out for certain.