Gothic Literature Quotes

Am I to be thought the only criminal, when all human kind sinned against me?

A bad conscience makes a very good ghost.

I knew that sound well too. It was the beating of the old man’s heart. It increased my fury, as the beating of a drum stimulates the soldier into courage.

would a madman have been so wise as this?

You see the world in colors, I see in Black and Red.

It was a privileged existence, but also a cage, beautifully decorated, but locked tight always.

I had the view of a castle of romance inhabited by a rosy spirit, such a place as would somehow, for diversion of the young idea, take all colour out of story-books and fairy-tales. Was n't it just a story-book over which I had fallen a-doze and a-dream?

Two souls, one body. Zwei Seelen, ein Körper.

Scar tissue does more than flaunt its strength by chronicling the assaults it has withstood. Scar tissue is new growth. And it is tougher than skin innocent of the blade.

Our fiction is not merely in flight from the physical data of the actual world…it is, bewilderingly and embarrassingly, a gothic fiction, nonrealistic and negative, sadist and melodramatic – a literature of darkness and the grotesque in a land of light and affirmation…our classic [American] literature is a literature of horror for boys

I loathed her with a hatred belonging more to demon than to man.

He speaks in that strange sports talk, telling me about the start of the new season and asks if I follow baseball. No. I really don’t. He assures me if I stay in town long enough I will become a baseball fan. It’s a requirement of living in St. Louis. Everyone is a Cardinal’s fan. “Loyal,” he tells me. St. Louis is a loyal town.

Mr. Hooper spent a long life, irreproachable in outward act, yet shrouded in dismal suspicions; kind and loving, though unloved, and dimly feared; a man apart from men, shunned in their health and joy, but ever summoned to their aid in mortal anguish.

The trees seemed to have eyes that were watching us and reaching out for me. They began to take on the shape of the dead.

Because I will always remember that when I told her I needed help burying a body, the first thing she said was, "Let me go get my shovel.

When the moon was high over the moors, Rhineholt became a dark place with long, lonely corridors whose shadows gave breath to many secrets.

Sexual desire is only the frustrated desire to eat human flesh.

Gormenghast. Withdrawn and ruinous it broods in umbra: the immemorial masonry: the towers, the tracts. Is all corroding? No. Through an avenue of spires a zephyr floats; a bird whistles; a freshet beats away from a choked river. Deep in a fist of stone a doll's hand wriggles, warm rebellious on the frozen palm. A shadow shifts its length. A spider stirs... And darkness winds between the characters. - Gormenghast

That she loved me I should not have doubted; and I might have been easily aware that, in a bosom such as hers, love would have regained no ordinary passion. But in death only was I fully impressed with the strength of her affection.

Poetry and visions, springing as they do from an ever-present sense of mortality, might easily appear morbid to the sturdy common sense of a burgher-class in the making.

If there is one genre of literature in which architecture indisputably plays a leading role, it is the gothic novel.

I made up my mind to take the life of the old man, and thus rid myself of the eye for ever.

Gloomy days, whether meteorological or psychological, lend themselves more to the creation of Gothic horror. On those insular days, the mind gravitates towards the unseen and the subconscious. Days of blinding sunshine banish the desire to ruminate and it is replaced with a longing to participate in the outside world.

To be everywhere at once and to know everybody was, after all, but to slip the cables of the tiny, separate self, and experience the Whole. Hence the desire to be elsewhere and otherwise. Hence, too, the innate yearning to share experiences of all kinds with others.

I greatly fear that she is of too super-sensitive a nature to go through the world without trouble.

For me, the watches of that long night passed in ghastly wakefulness; strained by dread: such dread as children only can feel.

I am not a thief. I take only what I need,” he growled. “Don’t we all, Swiss.

Many see Southern Gothic literature as just recalling the "bad old days." This is not the case. There are still those places in Florida where you get hookworms by walking barefoot after an afternoon thunderstorm.

Nothing is allowed to die in a society of storytelling people. It is all-the good and the bad-carted up and brought along from one generation to the next. And everything that is brought along is colored and shaped by those who bring it.

The large, gaping flaws in the construction of the stories--mad wives in the attic, strange apparitions in Belgium--are a representation of the life she could not face; these gothic subterfuges represent the mind at a breaking point, frantic to find any way out. If the flaws are only to be attributed to the practicce of popular fiction of the time, we cannot then explain the large amount of genuine feeling that goes into them. They stand for the hidden wishes of an intolerable life.

Joshua had always been able to get away with things—things for which he should never have been forgiven. He was a lot like James in that respect, for while my husband had bought his grace with his brilliance, Joshua did so with his looks. I considered that a moment, before turning away, suddenly finding I could not bear to look at him for fear of what I might forgive next.

Death begins before birth. I have always found this an odd notion, but were it not for the death of certain cells during our initial development, humans would be born with webbed toes. Death moulds our physical being from the very start of our existence. It sculpts us, determines how we begin, and where we end. The events in life that define us, that break us and remake us, all stem from death—the death of a place, a time, a relationship, of those we hold most dear, and finally ourselves. Death is the one inescapable aspect of life, the only immutable force, the single thing in this world that cannot and should not be changed. But death is never the end. It is the beginning.

The pagan gods are not dead, but can return to topple science with superstition and modern man with bestial pleasures that pre-date civilisation.

I'd not be shocked if bad water was the source of all the moody Gothic Lit classics. With a few cases of hookworm to add some Southern spunk.

And the ashes blew towards us with the salt wind from the sea.

Never fear, protecting my womb from Gothic novels is my first priority.

I took a deep, deep breath and held it in my core; kept it close behind my protruding, fleshless ribs. I swallowed it whole. I was home.

Potential enemies make the best friends and lovers. Many a blessed union begins in adversity.

you ought not to consider poverty a crime.

Love will have its sacrifices. No sacrifice without blood.

Non rivelai mai il mio amore verbalmente; però se gli sguardi hanno un linguaggio, anche il più perfetto idiota avrebbe potuto indovinare che io ne ero perdutamente innamorato.

A Tropic flower cannot live without sun. A soul cannot live without love.

Even the Bible admitted that the world was full of mystery and beauty and golden perfumed luxury.

Suddenly, in unconscious response to the steadiness of Nicholas' gaze, she raised her eyelids and looked full at him. A shock ran through her. Her heart beat in slow thick strokes. They looked across the room into each other's eyes for half a second only, then Nicholas', turning to the Countess, said smoothly: 'Ah, that is the most interesting, madame. Tell me more about your little blaise.' But Miranda knew that for all the triviality of the incident something cataclysmic had occurred. Their relationship had changed and from this point there could be no going back.

That's the measure of friendship, isn't it? Knowing people who will jar your secret and store it in a dark cellar forever. People who know it's never about the secret itself, but the keeping of it.

At length the grandeur of the mountains becomes monotonous; with familiarity, the landscape ceases to provoke awe and wonder and the traveller sees the alps with the indifferent eye of those who always live there.

It was a fact that had become the focus of my entire life, a whisper in my heartbeat, a permanent, insidious presence that punctuated my every breath. I couldn’t escape it, that persistent voice, lingering in the blood pulsing through my veins. It said only one thing, over and over, a repetition of inescapable anguish, the knowledge of a thing that could never be undone. James is dead. James is dead. James is dead. James is dead.

I liked the darkness, the dusty bay window, the view over the grey, muddy harbour and the towering cliffs beyond. How could I think of all that and dislike it, really, when in every nook and cranny I felt Peter’s eyes peering out, watching me?

Insects crawled across my skin, legs skittering across my flesh, numbed paths of cold left in their wake. They were the creatures that heralded my ghosts, and I knew them well, yet the revulsion they caused in those moments far exceeded anything I’d felt before.

She stood in the snow, effervescent, all pale skin and blonde hair, clad in white and bathed in moonlight. She should have looked angelic, instead she looked like a corpse, freshly raised from the grave, frosted in ice and darkness, swaying precariously in a graveyard.

It seemed for a moment as if something was there, loitering between the knurled and towering cherry trees, a flash of a presence as stark as the sight of the snow against their bare branches and cracked, piceous bark. Unblinking, I watched the edge of the lake, waiting for it to reappear, but whatever it had been was gone, vanished under cover of a willow tree, lofty and dense, rearing over the lake, its branches dripping all the way to the ground. The tree’s lament had been transformed into a thing of such beauty I was tempted to go and hide within it.

He was wearing a purple cloak over his shoulders in a strange, foreign fashion, his arms folded inside it. His face was deathly pale, but as his great black eyes stared at me, a dagger seemed to pierce my heart. A feeling of horror ran through me, and quickly turning my face away, I summoned all my strength and continued speaking. But as though compelled by some magic force, I could not help looking over towards him again and again. He still stood there, impassive and motionless, his ghostly eyes fixed upon me. Something resembling bitter scorn and hatred lay on his high, furrowed brow and his drawn lips. The whole figure had a horrible, frightening air about it. It was... it was the mysterious painter from the Holy Linden. Cruel, icy fingers clutched at my heart. A fearful sweat on my forehead; my phrases stuck in my throat, and my speech became more and more incoherent. But the terrible stranger still leant silently against the pillar, his glassy eyes set unwaveringly on me.

I found serenity in the towers, especially the highest, even in the midst of winter. The crows also enjoyed the lofts, and I habitually fed them. Often I held conference with the grotesques lining the summit. The gryphon was perhaps my favourite. I’d regularly sat beside them when feeling pensive, even before James’s death, one leg dangling precariously over the edge

My heart sank within me to behold that stately mansion in the midst of its expansive grounds — the park as beautiful now, in its wintry garb, as it could be in its summer glory; the majestic sweep, the undulating swell and fall, displayed to full advantage in that robe of dazzling purity, stainless and printless — save one long, winding track left by the trooping deer — the stately timber-trees with their heavy laden branches gleaming white against the full, grey sky; the deep, encircling woods; the broad expanse of water sleeping in frozen quiet; and the weeping ash and willow drooping their snowclad boughs above it — all presented a picture, striking, indeed, and pleasing to an unencumbered mind, but by no means encouraging to me.

The past had already been dealt with, to one end or another, it was certain, fixed, the horror of it was already over. For the living at least. They grieved, yes, but they were not trapped in the terror of the moment. Not so for my poor, elegant wraiths. They were like the old-fashioned zoetropes you find at the seaside: a tiny slice of a world in a box, brief yet somehow also eternal.

Cormac McCarthy has to be accounted as a secret master, and the rightful heir (but oh how one hates to invoke yet another Great American Writer in discussing McCarthy, who at times has seemed ot be in danger of disappearing in a heavy snowfall of comparisons to Melville, Faulkner, O'Conner, Hemingway) to the American Gothic tradition of Poe and Lovecraft, dark god of Providence, Rhode Island, where McCarthy was born.

I imagined her poised, a humerus in one hand, a toothbrush in the other, as she gently brushed away the last remnants of the person who had once used that arm to shake hands, open doors, lift a mug of tea. I wondered if it was so very different from how I myself looked when I sat on the floor of my finds room, perhaps sitting cross-legged, at the centre of a circle of newly cleaned bones, a tibia in one hand, a toothbrush in the other …

The reflection was that of a putrefying corpse. By some trick of the light, her face seemed sallow and slipping, the patches of darkness giving the appearance of skin sloughing off in small pockets. I’d almost forgotten the knife in my panic; the woman was far more dangerous than the weapon. Blood drizzled down the blade, obscuring the macabre reflection of Natalya’s face and suddenly I was transfixed by a thought that should have been immediate: Whose blood is that?

Touch the stone,' said Beliah, 'and you will touch "reality", or what the ignorant of all ages think "reality" is. That kind of truth will kill you, man. You won't see morning! I have kept you all your life from such things as remorse, terror, pity. Touch the stone, and those same angels will change you into an old poor pathetic deluded dying creature. Hubert, a nurse has to shave you, your hand shakes so much. You know that don't you? You dribble at every orifice, Hubert. You've begun to smell this past year or two...' He suddenly howled as if I had actually touched the stone,'YOU WILL BE RAVAGED IN FIRES OF GRACE!' I heard Nurse McGregor in the next ward. 'Good evening,' came her cheerful voice to the looney who had strangled his sweetheart and then buried her in his garden. 'Is it cocoa tonight, or tea, or milk?" Beliah was weeping. Outside the eaves dripped. The whole earth was drenched with the grief of Beliah. He wept inside me. I felt his marvellous tears on my face.

The castle is situated at the terminus of a long and upward-winding mountain road. It presents a somewhat forbidding aspect to the world, for there is little about it to suggest gaiety or warmth or any of those qualities that might assure a wayfarer of welcome. Rather, this vast edifice of stone exudes an austerity, cold and repellent, a hint of ancient mysteries long buried, an effluvium of medieval dankness and decay. At night, and most particularly on nights when the moon is slim or cloud-enshrouded, it is a heavy blot upon the horizon, a shadow only, without feature save for its many-turreted outline; and should the moon be temporarily released from her cloudy confinement, her fugitive rays lend scant comfort, for they but serve to throw the castle into sudden, startling chiaroscuro, its windows fleetingly assuming the appearance of sightless though all-seeing orbs, its portcullis becoming for an instant a gaping mouth, its entire form striking the physical and the mental eye as would the sight of a giant skull.

Presently a soprano voice of richness and depth floated from the open windows of the parlor, resonating over the darkening greenery. All at once it was as if the entire scene before them was awakened by that voice, infused with unexpected life: the western sky, streaked with bands of pale gold and purple; the two houses, standing gray and disconsolate against that sky; the clusters of trees casting deep black shadows here and there across the ground. The same voice that brought everything suddenly to life also drew them into another, much deeper world—a world that was normally hidden, a world that stretched out into eternity. Yusuke, who had at first looked on with a sense of distance as everyone else sat listening, their faces intent on the music, found himself being gradually drawn in as well, forgetting the moment and the place, lending his ear during that unworldly stretch of time as if entranced. No one spoke. The singing could not have lasted ten minutes, but when it ended he found the darkness all at once grew deeper.

In Gothic fiction, characters must contend with the dead, with active hauntings or with hallucinations of hauntings, as well as whatever other trying circumstances they might find themselves in: orphanhood, lunacy, imprisonment, inheritances that go astray, troubling romantic situations. The Gothic novel does not strive for subtlety, and it isn't to everyone's taste. It can seem adolescent, an immature version of the stately, measured, grown-up realist novel, except that the line between Gothic and the realist is never clear. A disdain for the Gothic is limiting, since this literature, in all its flagrancy, has something to say about emotional as well as physical death, and a tale of a haunting can have a narrative vitality that is far from conclusive. Gothic stories linger especially in the mind.

The nations whose chief support was in the chase, whose chief interest was in the battle, whose chief pleasure was in the banquet, would take small care respecting the shapes of leaves and flowers; and notice little in the forms of the forest trees which sheltered them, except the signs indicative of the wood which would make the toughest lance, the closest roof, or the clearest fire. The affectionate observation of the grace and outward character of vegetation is the sure sign of a more tranquil and gentle existence, sustained by the gifts, and gladdened by the splendour, of the earth. In that careful distinction of species, and richness of delicate and undisturbed organisation, which characterise the Gothic design, there is the history of rural and thoughtful life, influenced by habitual tenderness, and devoted to subtle inquiry; and every discriminating and delicate touch of the chisel, as it rounds the petal or guides the branch, is a prophecy of the development of the entire body of the natural sciences, beginning with that of medicine, of the recovery of literature, and the establishment of the most necessary principles of domestic wisdom and national peace.

In my introduction to Warriors, the first of our crossgenre anthologies, I talked about growing up in Bayonne, New Jersey, in the 1950s, a city without a single bookstore. I bought all my reading material at newsstands and the corner “candy shops,” from wire spinner racks. The paperbacks on those spinner racks were not segregated by genre. Everything was jammed in together, a copy of this, two copies of that. You might find The Brothers Karamazov sandwiched between a nurse novel and the latest Mike Hammer yarn from Mickey Spillane. Dorothy Parker and Dorothy Sayers shared rack space with Ralph Ellison and J. D. Salinger. Max Brand rubbed up against Barbara Cartland. A. E. van Vogt, P. G. Wodehouse, and H. P. Lovecraft were crammed in with F. Scott Fitzgerald. Mysteries, Westerns, gothics, ghost stories, classics of English literature, the latest contemporary “literary” novels, and, of course, SF and fantasy and horror—you could find it all on that spinner rack, and ten thousand others like it. I liked it that way. I still do. But in the decades since (too many decades, I fear), publishing has changed, chain bookstores have multiplied, the genre barriers have hardened. I think that’s a pity. Books should broaden us, take us to places we have never been and show us things we’ve never seen, expand our horizons and our way of looking at the world. Limiting your reading to a single genre defeats that. It limits us, makes us smaller. It seemed to me, then as now, that there were good stories and bad stories, and that was the only distinction that truly mattered.

he night beyond the window was still, mordant white snow, punctuated only by the eerie dark of the trees, gumshoeing their way along the edge of the path outside. Their skeletal fingers clawed up at the stars, held down by an insidious, weightless lacing of snowflakes. I gazed idly at the moon and wondered if it truly had the power to sway the will of men.

The night beyond the window was still, mordant white snow, punctuated only by the eerie dark of the trees, gumshoeing their way along the edge of the path outside. Their skeletal fingers clawed up at the stars, held down by an insidious, weightless lacing of snowflakes. I gazed idly at the moon and wondered if it truly had the power to sway the will of men.

Si asesinar es tu única virtud, entonces es una maldición.

It's almost amusing, in a dark and twisted way, how I've spent my whole life tip-toeing around sharp edges - forever trying to outfox fate just to survive. Now, as if life has come full circle, I find myself intentionally steering into the eye of the storm.

The New Testament has been preserved in more manuscripts than any other ancient work of literature, with over 5,800 complete or fragmented Greek manuscripts catalogued, 10,000 Latin manuscripts and 9,300 manuscripts in various other ancient languages including Syriac, Slavic, Gothic, Ethiopic, Coptic, Nubian, and Armenian. The dates of these manuscripts range from c. 125 (the

The New Testament has been preserved in more manuscripts than any other ancient work of literature, with over 5,800 complete or fragmented Greek manuscripts catalogued, 10,000 Latin manuscripts and 9,300 manuscripts in various other ancient languages including Syriac, Slavic, Gothic, Ethiopic, Coptic, Nubian, and Armenian. The dates of these manuscripts range from c. 125 (the

The New Testament has been preserved in more manuscripts than any other ancient work of literature, with over 5,800 complete or fragmented Greek manuscripts catalogued, 10,000 Latin manuscripts and 9,300 manuscripts in various other ancient languages including Syriac, Slavic, Gothic, Ethiopic, Coptic, Nubian, and Armenian.

İnsanlık zaafları genç zihinler tarafından asla seve isteye kabullenilmez. Etkileri tanımsız olduğu kadar değişken de olan birtakım amaçlar üstünden hayatlarımızı sürdürdüğümüzü; dün bizi büyük bir güçle etkileyen şeyin bugün hayal meyal hissedilebileceğini, hatta belki yarın göz ardı edilebileceğini bilmek bize acı verir. Bu tatsız gerçeği nihayet kabullendiğimizdeyse, iyilik ne zaman karşımıza çıksa onu tiksintiyle reddeder, hükmedemeyeceğimiz bir mutluluğu paylaşmaktan uzak durur ve sık sık geçici bir karamsarlığa kapılırız. Sonunda tecrübe ya da tesadüf bizi bu hatamızdan geri döndürür ve üzerimizde keyifli ama kalıcı bir etki yaratabilecek bir amaç sunar bize. İşte o etkiye mutluluk deriz. Mutluluğun zevk diye anılan duygudan farkı, temelinde erdemin yatıyor olmasıdır ve erdem de aklın ürünü olduğundan, istikrarlı bir etki yaratabilecek kapasiteye sahiptir.

From state to state, county to county, I breezed along, and this progress was a way of understanding how lucky I was, because the confinement that Southerners feel, their keen awareness of themselves as stereotypes—provincials and yokels, in literature, in life—is something palpable. No wonder, given the obliqueness of Southern fiction (and one way to know a place is through its writing)—the evasions, the jokes, the showy literary metaphors. No wonder the grotesque preponderance of the gothic and the freaks—the reality was too brutal to state baldly, unbearably so.

There Peter sat in the new sunlight, plaiting the straw for baskets, until he saw the thing he had been taught most to fear advancing silently along the lea of an outcrop of rock.

She's still quite fit at ninety, fit enough to chew her food with her own teeth. Apparently she grew up in a house without a bar of soap, let alone tooth powder. Her family didn't have electricity until she started elementary school, and she'd never seen a train until the tracks of the Koumi line were laid in Saku. It's exactly as if she were born in the Edo period. These days, you only have to drive for five minutes to find a sparkling clean convenience store, with bright lights above shelves stocked with everything you could possibly need. Land that used to be fields of mulberry bushes is now crisscrossed by smooth, wide roads lined with video rental stores and fast food restaurants. I would say O-Hatsu has seen more changes in her lifetime than I have. After all, she lived for most of the century when this country was changing faster than it ever had before. Even so, I have a feeling that the inside of her head has remained much the same as when she was a girl. By "the inside of her head" I mean the way she sees the world around her—the language she uses to make sense of it. In my case, the very way I looked at the world and the words I used to understand it had altogether changed.

In the distance, steel-blue mountains loomed heavy on the horizon, their shoulders burdened with the same accursed snow the gods were currently depositing upon the lowlands. Between us and the mountains, the vast expanse of one of the innumerable caravan sites littering the Welsh shores was dimly visible, and at the far edges of the sands, grey waves tipped a mulch of brown foam up on to the beach, a sudden deposition of wishy-washy creatures that seemed to spider-leg over each other in their haste to reach the shore and see what all the fuss was about. But even these creatures comprised of sea-foam were freaked out by the death-stare, for the little critters swiftly dissipated under the force of a skeletal glower. A skull lay in the sand, its empty sockets staring down the beach at the retreating surge. Their fear wouldn’t last long. Soon they’d realise the skeleton had not engaged in pursuit, their confidence would grow, and they’d encroach, further and further up the bank. Eventually, they’d be close enough to see it was completely inert, and would overrun our position, victoriously sweeping up their fallen foe and dragging it back out with them into the dreary waves.

Children are more able to objectively synthesize a story involving vampires, monsters, or dragons due to the distance afforded by the fantastical elements than they are a story revolving around horrors committed by human beings.

Loneliness is like curfew, in the bird's cage.

Oh, curses on my voice, tripping out before my mind can call halt to the words.

Eliza knows there is a deep pit in the middle of the floor, darker and more binding than the cell. Sciapods are in there, giggling beneath their monstrous feet. They want to stomp me to a paste and spread me on ash cakes, she thinks.

Maybe because gothic literature’s endings are almost always tragic. Almost.

The darkness and the night made her see monsters where there were only shadows, screams where a creaking door opened, whispers where the wind swayed.

Eighteenth-century English readers couldn’t get enough of the macabre, and by the latter half of the century, the Gothic novel was the most popular genre of literature

Eighteenth-century English readers couldn’t get enough of the macabre, and by the latter half of the century, the Gothic novel was the most popular genre of literature. Enter Ann Radcliffe, who wrote the most popular Gothic romances of the 1790s, making her a best-selling writer in her day and establishing the definitive formula for the genre.

The question I want to begin with is impossibly overdetermined – it is the question of why we are so afraid. The particular answer I will trace out derives from my increasing belief that Gothic literature in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is more than a phenomenon of Anglo-American life. It is a project. To explain and explore this notion, I want to offer a contribution to one of the longest on-going enterprises in fiction studies – the attempt to define the nature of the Gothic in literature. Nearly two hundred years ago, vexed reviewers struggled to explain the amazing, perverse, inescapable, loathsome, irresistible phenomenon of The Monk, by contrasting the narrative strategies of Matthew Gregory Lewis and Ann Radcliffe. From the controversy over the Monk came the first tools for defining Gothic fiction: the distinction between terror and horror. The inadequacy of these useful terms has driven students of the Gothic for the past two centuries to offer other terms, to devise other distinctions. A distinction common in recent Gothic studies is my starting point. Critics frequently create a binary opposition between inside and outside, between Gothic as an exploration of the unconscious and Gothic as a concern for and even an intervention in social reality. In refusing this bogus binary of Freud versus Marx, I want to define a Gothic praxis that involves – necessarily – the interplay of psychological and social forces. This interplay has determined both the title and the subtitle of my essay. My title, the nurture of the Gothic, plays obviously on the phrase already old by John Ruskin’s time – the nature of the Gothic – because I believe the nature of the Gothic is to nurture. This belief derives from what I take to be a basic fact of communal life: that societies inflict terrible wounds upon themselves and at the same time develop mechanisms that can help heal these wounds. Gothic fiction from the later eighteenth century to the present is one such mechanism. Not consciously and yet purposively, Anglo-American culture develops Gothic in order to help heal the damage caused by our embrace of modernity. Thus my title: Gothic’s nature is the psycho-social function of nurture; its project is to heal and transform. To define this healing process, I will begin with the work of a physician, the British paediatrician and psychoanalyst, D.W. Winnicott. His notions of potential space, transitional objects and play will help me produce a general definition of Gothic that I can then historicise and contextualise, drawing upon such thinkers as Michel Foucault, Michael Taussig, Ross Chambers, and Peter Stallybrass and Allon White. This will bring me to the question posed in my subtitle – how can a text be both popular and subversive? Why do we hug closest that which threatens us most? This is another way of asking, how does Gothic nurture? Which is another way of asking, why are we so afraid?

To be a woman is fated vehemently morbid.

A Reclusive Invitation by Stewart Stafford In a mansion crouched at the forest's edge, Gargoyles perched on a Jericho hedge, Lived Samuel Keane, with millions at least, Welcomed the locals to his Christmas feast. Self-imposed exile of wealth's solitary scene, On that evening, time for connection pristine, An alabaster white suit in a chessboard hall; Legions of armour and battle scars to recall. "Come, gather round, let camaraderie ignite! On Christmas Eve, a dream-come-true night!" Perkins, the grey butler, in reluctant festive red, Gestured them toward Keane's banquet spread. Their gracious host took his place at the end, A throne chair helped into place with a bend, Beaming, he clapped and food was brought in, To gasps and applause at the goblets of gin. A succulent feast at a baronial ball; Roasted goose, boar, a tall glass highball, Stories grew taller, just like each drink, Songs and jests sent them over the brink. Enjoyment and melody's atmosphere bright, Fleeting warmth shared in lush candlelight. Dawn looms, Les Misérables adore company: "Why does hangover guilt crave chablis?" A Father Christmas event once a year, Guests departed, a loud triple cheer, A fading smile of a host so grand, Adrift, nothing elaborate planned. The fireworks faded, the last ember died, Keane shut his mansion with secrets inside. A portcullis closed slowly on a seasonal high, A gothic arch door shut 'neath morning star sky. © 2024, Stewart Stafford. All rights reserved.

And when she had spoken such a rhapsody, she would press me more closely in her trembling embrace, and her lips in soft kisses gently flow upon my cheek.