Gothic Tradition and Gothic Conventions

This passage entails many key features of the Gothic tradition where

Gothic conventions, with the usage of archetypal symbols, dominate

much of the text. Other than effectively evoking horror, suspense and

unease in the reader, the Gothic uses these conventions to challenge

and destabilize certain concepts and perceptions of the world.

Boundaries of binary oppositions are also blurred in the process. The

Gothic conventions that prevalent in the passage are the setting and

atmosphere, the role double, the supernatural visitation, extreme

interior mental states of the narrator and the apparitions and the

fragmented mental states of the narrator.

The setting of the passage is dark and obscure, typical of the Gothic.

The visitation by the apparitions occurs at an "untimely" hour, about

"four or five o'clock", a time when most people are asleep and that

anything that may happen would be left unnoticed. By taking into

consideration the fact that most of the time people are unfamiliar

with the surroundings and activities of the wee-hours of the morning,

a foreign, strange, Unheimlich sensation is created. Although it is

presumably in the comforts of the speaker's own room, the fact that it

is "dark" lends to the sinister tone of the atmosphere evoking further

unease. As seen in the other gothic narratives, most visitations by

the otherworldly occur in such setting. For example in Dracula, the

fateful visit the Count made to Lucy occurs in the dark setting of the

night and in Jane Eyre, Bertha Mason, the madwoman, too visits the

protagonist Jane in a similar setting.

The Gothic endorses the use of otherworldly creatures. For example in

Frankenstein there is a human-created-monster and in Dracula, the

Count have physiognomy that are inhuman. The presence of the

apparitions in the passage addresses this tradition of the Gothic,

evoking terror and suspense. The apparitions are otherworldly in a

sense that they defy all forms of classifications. They do no have a

fixed definite shape as the narrator describe them to be "intangible

weird Shapes" and were "impossible to tell whether they were men or

women" throwing them out of the spectrum of a normal human being. They

embody images of death with their "dark garments" as such garments

express a form of mourning. On top of that, to Jung, the idea of the

figures being "closely hooded" elevate them the highest sphere of the

celestial world because for the most powerful gods in Greek mythology

were known wear them. However, in the context of the passage, the

hoods are worn to conceal and intimidate, subverting the idea of the

divine as being protectors of mankind. Ominously, covering the head

therefore meant far more than becoming invisible, it meant to vanish