Gothic horror spaces function as demonic womb-like prisons for their victims

Evidence

In the Gothic, “[a] rt withdraws into caverns, castles, prison-cells, tombs, coffins. Gothic is a style of claustrophobic sensuality. Its closed spaces are demonic wombs. The gothic novel is sexually archaic; it withdraws into chthonian darkness.” The tales examined below all express this sensibility: in Beckford’s Vathek, massacred boys are thrown into a subterranean pit; in Zofloya, there is no escape from the large dark forest that surrounds the victims; and in Dracula, there are numerous prisons—Dracula’s castle, the coffins, the mental hospital, and the illness that consumes Lucy and the monster’s other victims. These spaces are, as Paglia notes, all womb-like. — Sophia Rose Arjana, Muslims in the Western Imagination, 429

Categorization

• QUESTION: Does the womb-as-prison reading apply consistently across the Muslim-monster canon, or only to Gothic-era tales?