Opening the Gates to Darkness: Gothic Diversity

Abstract

The final chapter looks at how despite threats of its imminent exhaustion and demise, the several branches of contemporary women’s Gothic flourish and diversify. The chapter argues that Gothic is a cultural connection and critical comment, essentially political and personal. The extraordinary horrors of the everyday might threaten to overwhelm our sensibilities and abilities to cope, imagine and act, but having a Gothic mindset helps put some of this into perspective so that we use our imaginations for vision and agency, without underestimating the threats and horrors. The author first considers Hilary Mantel’s Eight Months on Ghazzah Street, exposing cultural incarceration and danger. Gothic influenced by postmodernism and neo-Victorianism revisits the past, rewrites, replays, and re-stories familiar figures such as Dracula in Elizabeth Kostova’s The Historian, (2005) or fictionalised Victorian poets in A. S. Byatt’s Possession (1990). The chapter explores and reimagines historical moments (Sarah Waters, Fingersmith. Virago Press, 2002; Elizabeth Kostova, The Swan Thieves. Little Brown, 2010) and uses psycho-geography to reinterpret and replace the history of haunted spaces, places and events. Gina Wisker explores Jeanette Winterson’s Hammer Horror novel, The Daylight Gate (2012), as a particularly powerful version of revisiting history, indicting the duplicitous and sinister, letting the silenced speak, exposing hypocrisy, abuse and violence against women, without losing any of the inflection of the demonic and powerful otherness, revealing and celebrating its synergies.