Gothic effects require the artificial reinvigoration of the virtue-vice binary

Evidence

And like the private version of the traditional gothic romance, they depend for their effects on the revitalization of ethics as a set of mental categories, and on the reinflation and artificial reinvigoration of that tired and antiquated binary opposition between virtue and vice, which the eighteenth century cleansed of its theological remnants and thoroughly sexualized before passing it on down to us. — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 632

Categorization

• XREF: Ties to the reader’s concern with cognitive mapping — the binary is an old cognitive category artificially reinflated, relevant to how they locate themselves.