Key Gothic features

• Gothic patriarchal oppressors are prone to incest, possibly exercising driot du seignor (the right of the first night)
• Gothic gender dichotomies view women as either madonnas or whores
• Gothic settings are often transported to exotic, unexplored locations (terra incongnita)
• A recurring Gothic motif is memento mori - a reminder of human mortality
• Gothic settings are often symbols of ancien regime - a political system that has been displaced by another, more modern, one
• Abjection is everything 'in-between... ambiguous...composite', any bodily fluids or human death is abjection, producing horrified revulsion
• Terror is the anxiety and dread that comes from the fear of the unknown or the yet-to-come.
• The Sublime is a sense of awe, astonishment, of being overwhelmed in the face of something much bigger than ourselves, whether a landscape, power, an awareness of vastness, infinity, difficulty magnificence or emotion (such as terror). It depends on obscurity - we cannot fully see the landscape or fully comprehend the experience.
• The uncanny is the strange, eerie or mysterious. In Freudian terms, this is that which is both foreign or strange yet it is at the same time familiar, producing a particularly unsettling experience.
• Taboos are cultural, moral or religious rules which are put under pressure or violated (for example, incest, murder), challenging limits or norms
• Dichotomies/oppositions - the oppositions associated with the Gothic are sanity/madness, living/dead, male/female. In the Gothic genre, these dichotomies are often put under pressure and may be shown to collapse, showing that they are not quite as rigidly different as we might have believed.
• Otherness - anything which is different from ourselves and is therefore perceived in some way as a threat - perhaps because, despite its apparent 'otherness', we see ourselves in it
• Obscurity - lack of clarity is a key element of the experience of the sublime. It includes both physical and mental obscurity (darkness, fogginess, confusion, and things not being seen or understood clearly.)
• Horror is the fear of something concrete, as experienced when someone encounters a spectre, a monster, or a scene of violence.
• Revenant is a term used to describe the past, 'what comes back'. This includes ghosts, hauntings, and the return of the unwanted, perhaps repressed, elements from the past.
• Doppelganger - german for double, mirror image or alter ego of a character, perhaps revealing the negative, evil or repressed within the individual.
• The liminal refers to the experience of being on a threshold/boundary; marginal; the point on the boundary, borderline or threshold of two states - neither one thing nor another; the point of uncertainty and fluidity, refusing categorisation; the unfixed between any two terms.
• Abhuman - something that is only vestigially human and possibly in the process of becoming something monstrous, such as a vampire or werewolf.
• Isolation - the state of being far from or out of contact with others - physical or psychological.
• Entrapment - being in a state of imprisonment (physical or mental)
• The villain is usually male, a patriarchal oppressor, often an aristocrat related to the heroine.
• The heroine is usually a pious, virginal orphan, a damsel in distress. Or she is a succubus-like temptress
• The weather is often extreme to convey pathetic fallacy
• The Gothic is obsessed with the 'other' - anyone who isn't white, middle-class and protestant
• The laws of the land are undermined by corrupt figures of power (lords, catholic monks)
• The narrative style is hyperbolic, elevated and florid