#judith wilt

[gothicseverance]

Disrupting her captor’s diagnosis by anticipating it, ironizing and covertly opposing his discourse by parrotting it.

—Love/Slave

[gothicseverance]

The Gothic stages an animated carceral spectacle with multiple vantage points, confining random violence in intimate orderings. The writer and the reader, the protagonist and antagonist, both see and *see through* prison bars everywhere. Freedom or even identity itself may consist in bursting in, or in bursting out.

—Love/Slave

Gif by @emziess 🖤

[gothicseverance]

From the earliest studies, critics of the Gothic have concentrated on its presentation of peculiar “spaces.”

—Love/Slave

[gothicseverance]

Gothic is (...) useful in naming the dyad, Power/Suffering, beater/beaten, male/female, master/slave, and in establishing subversive moments of endurance, resistance, subterranean powers within the Sufferer, lesson-validations for the female reader living in that courtship or marital Gothic space to which she returns when she closes the Gothic text.

—Love/Slave

[gothicseverance]

The enormous complexity of the Gothic as a mode of dramatizing contestation for a prized space.

—Love/Slave

[gothicseverance]

Intimacy is violence and violence is made to seem the only intimacy.

—Love/Slave

Art by @vonlipvig 🖤

[gothicseverance]

[Some Gothic heroines] take remedial action: they take the initiative to go out from, inevitably also out to, evil. They may “wrestle it to the ground” and return to a house whose gates remain open, symbolizing that “world” and “home” invariably interact. Or they may fall along the way.

—Burning down the house

[gothicseverance]

Radical liberation, destruction of confinements.

—Love/Slave