#severance 2.08

[gothicseverance]

Another theme crucial to women’s Gothic: the misprizing of the heroine, and the final triumphant unveiling of her true nature.

—Male and Female Mysteries

Gif by @bladesrunner 🖤

[gothicseverance]

The heroine’s experiences (...) are represented as a journey leading towards the assumption of some kind of agency and power in the patriarchal world, or alternatively as a search for an absent mother.

—The Gothic

Gif by @lousolversons 🖤

[gothicseverance]

The ancestral home (…) may be haunted by literal or figurative ghosts and often contains physical evidence of past misdeeds or tragedies.

—The Gothic Library

[gothicseverance]

An ancestral home can be located in any town, city, or isolated landscape, in any country, allowing the Gothic to extend into new climes not visited before. This was particularly important to the development of the American Gothic, given our unfortunate lack of castles.

—The Gothic Library

[gothicseverance]

The bereaved become the dead for themselves.

—Devouring the Gothic

[gothicseverance]

Thomas Man, William Godwin and Friedrich Engels are just a few examples of nineteenth-century writers who employed the tropes, themes and rhetoric of the Gothic to portray the terrible human costs of industrialization, framing the Industrial Revolution as a site of Gothic torture, excess and horror.

—Industrial Gothic

[gothicseverance]

A typical Gothic mother is absent or dead.

—TVTropes

[gothicseverance]

British and American texts written about, for and by factory and mill workers in the period 1800 to 1870 employed the Gothic, otherwise commonly considered to be a non-realistic genre, to figure the world-altering changes caused by industrialization.

—Industrial Gothic