Summary Gothic Passage plan and things to look for

Gothic passage crib sheet
Intro:

 Place it in its gothic period/ context of the time
 What is happening in the text?
 Why is it gothic?
 Relate to other gothic texts

Perspective/ narrator:

o 1st – intimate, experience their emotions, subjective, potentially untrustworthy
o 3rd – objective, voyeuristic, detached, intended audience
o Omnipotent – objective, reliable
o Fragmented – disorientating, ambiguous
o Past – distorted, unreliable, detached, liminal
o Present – confrontational, close proximity increases terror, vulnerability
o Exaggerated/ complex/ subtle/ archaic

Setting:

 Forbidden
 Decadent
 Macabre/ morbid
 Isolated/ alienating
 Desolate / decaying
 Sublime/ Wilderness
 Familiar
 Domestic
 Urban
 Foreign
 Grandeur/ decadent
 Archaic
 Claustrophobic / entrapment/ emprisoning
 Expansive/ immense
 Gloomy
 Dark
 Disorientating/ labyrinth
 Death

Gothic Tropes:

o Imagined or realistic threats (psychological/ physical)
o Terror (activates the mind and the imagination allowing it to overcome and even transcend its
fears and doubts, the subject can move from passivity to activity)
o Horror (freezes the senses the mind rendering it passive)
o Transgression/ taboo
o Desires
o Power
o Boundaries