Gothic monster landscapes symbolize demonic wombs and female genitalia

Evidence

Gender figures prominently in Gothic narratives in monsters cast as nuns, mothers, and other females and as landscapes that function as symbols of female genitalia. 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. Gender often characterizes Gothic monsters. Dracula is gender-ambiguous; he is presented as almost androgynous—attractive to both Jonathon and Mina—a Gothic David Bowie. — Sophia Rose Arjana, Muslims in the Western Imagination, 429

Categorization

• DEFINE: Establishes the gendering of Gothic monstrosity — landscapes as female genitalia, monsters as androgynous — as an analytical framework.
• XREF: connects to: The moon and snake symbolize ambivalent fertility tied to womanhood