Gothic decay themes encoded anxieties about racial pollution by out-groups
Evidence
- Cannon Schmitt, Alien Nation: Nineteenth-Century Gothic Fictions and English Nationality (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997), 10. The focus on decay reflects concerns about racial purity, which could be destroyed by the Irish, Jews, Muslims, and other undesirables. — Sophia Rose Arjana, Muslims in the Western Imagination, 794
Categorization
- XREF: This is the reader’s core mechanism — the monster as container for racial-purity anxiety — directly linking the Muslim monster to anti-Irish and anti-Jewish Gothic imagery.
- QUESTION: Worth chasing: how exactly does ‘decay’ in Gothic fiction function as an anxiety proxy for racial purity across the Irish, Jewish, and Muslim figures simultaneously?