Gothic literature is a genre of literature that developed from Romanticism in the 18th century, with The Castle of Otranto widely regarded as the first of its kind. The genre has many 'tropes', sterotypes or common features.

The 18th century revival of Gothic medieval architecture brought a renewed focus onto the eeriness of setting in popular literature, providing a tool for writers to use their writings to describe the structure of the mind.

The setting of The Bloody Chamber bares way to a suitable 'atmosphere' for the exploration of the speaker's unconscious mind. The speaker moves away from the busy...

The extract implies Walpole started this gothic tradition with the first sentence ‘the lower part of the castle’ being interpreted symbolically as a sexual reference to the nether regions of man trapping the beautiful, ‘conscious innocence’ of the woman.

In both Bram Stoker’s Dracula and Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber, gothic conventions are employed in order to express the writers’ attitude towards gender roles. During the Victorian era, attitudes to gender were very conservative and based on a rigid dichotomous model.

The Bloody Chamber anthology was written long after the height of the gothic genre, and coincided with a second wave of feminist ideology. The natural settings therefore can be seen as a way of exploring the idea that female characters are no longer trapped and are in fact liberated from a domestic life under the eyes of a dominant male figure.

Dark, stormy,and gloomy settings; such as a haunted castle, an abandoned house, or some spooky moors Think Frankenstein, Jekyll & Hyde, Dracula, Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights - that sort of thing - and you're on the right track.

A possible introduction to this essay may be:The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories and Wide Sargasso Sea adapt traditional fairytales and Jane Eyre, respectively, for a more progressive, desensitised, adult reader. Their settings, both internal and external, feed into a larger discourse about the position of women in society.

This and the theme of entrapment are further highlighted through the setting of a castle, another typical Gothic setting that is used for the reminder of archaic and aristocratic societies.

Shelley utilises the gothic trope of lightning and stormy weather as a metaphor for the presence of God throughout the novel and this metaphor develops alongside the narrative. It is first described in an encounter witness by a 15 year-old Frankenstein.