Gothic decay tropes encoded anxieties about racial purity threats

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: Book’s own chapters track decay imagery; supports the reader’s thesis that monster figures carry specific racial anxieties.