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The Lamb by Lucy Rose: A Review

'She carried something terrible with her. She kept her grief subdued and quiet – so much so, it had begun to rot.' Margot and Mama have lived by the forest ever since Margot can remember. When Margot is not at school they spend quiet days together in their cottage, waiting for strangers to knock on their door—"strays," Mama calls them, people who have strayed too far from the road. Mama loves the strays. She feeds them wine, keeps them warm. Then she picks apart their bodies and toasts them off with some vegetable oil. The Lamb by Lucy Rose is a refreshing take on the folk horror genre. Exploring themes of femininity, isolation, primal desires and coming-of-age in a living, breathing, nightmare. This claustrophobic book really delves into femininity at its most primal, its most animalistic. It toys with the notion of women being the hunter - gorging herself on her desires, and not letting anyone get in the way of that. Rose writes of disgusting and manipulative women ...
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Toxic Masculinity and Domestic Abuse Represented Within Gothic Literature

In this essay, I will argue how domestic violence throughout the Gothic highlights women’s issues through the texts of Edgar Allan Poe’s The Black Cat and Stephen King’s The Shining  TW: discussion of domestic violence/animal abuse  A study carried out by the Crime Survey for England and Wales (CSEW) showed that in 2018 an estimated 1.6 million women and 786,00 men aged between seventeen and seventy-four had experienced domestic abuse in the UK. That’s roughly seven in every one hundred women and four in every one hundred men. The statistics show that women are more likely to fall victim to domestic abuse than men, often a crime that occurs ‘behind closed doors’ and is rarely reported to the police. Occurring in the home, domestic violence and abuse often involve controlling behaviour, assaults, threats, and ‘punishment’ towards a partner or family member. Due to reported instances of domestic violence and rape remaining disclosed in UK and American law, the Second Wave femini...

The Passion of New Eve by Angela Carter: A Review

I know nothing. I am a tabula rasa, a blank sheet of paper, an unhatched egg. I have not yet become a woman, although I possess a woman's shape. Not a woman, no: both more and less than a real woman. Now I am a being as mythic and monstrous as Mother herself . . . ' New York has become the City of Dreadful Night where dissolute Leilah performs a dance of chaos for Evelyn. But this young Englishman's fate lies in the arid desert, where a many-breasted fertility goddess will wield her scalpel to transform him into the new Eve. Written in 1977 against the backdrop of second wave feminism, Angela Carter writes The Passion of New Eve . A darkly satirical novel which comments on the notions of power, sexual identity and gender. Carter herself describes it as ‘anti-mythic...I conceived it as a feminist tract about the social construction of femininity, amongst other things.’ In Angela Carter: Of Wolves and Women (an incredible documentary on Carter’s work), she says ‘I wanted to ...

‘The Blood Countess’ Elizabeth Bathory and Gothic Criminology

  *TW* descriptions of violence and true crime The Gothic in literary terms has always been a way in which traditions can be subverted and allows the writers and audience to focus in on the mysterious, the shocking and the macabre. Repressed fears and trauma manifesting themselves in different ways to evoke a complex range of emotions within its audience, from terror to awe, commenting on the darker side of the human subconscious. Usually focusing on a personification of evil, the monster within the Gothic is a study of the social construction of incomprehensive acts. A serial killer is considered much the same as the Gothic monster trope within popular media - sub-human and abject recreational acts of madness and merciless, often motiveless evil. The Gothic monster provides a narrative archetype for serial killers to be portrayed by the media, which then can blur the lines between fiction and true crime in order to separate serial killers to the public, rather than the public ackn...