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Identity Formation In Gothic Literature

706 Words3 Pages
In addition, at the turn of the twentieth-century, subjects are awakened to a world of horror which discloses that the nineteenth-century concept of a unified identity is dissolved and instead celebrates the multiplicity and fluidity of evolving and fragmented subjectivities as Stuart Hall writes that the postmodern subject has “no fixed, essential or permanent identity” but rather assumes “different identities at different times” (qtd in Richardson, Smith, Werndly 45). Then, while the traditional gothic plot centres on the theme of identity formation, stressing the necessity of setting the boundaries of the self, postmodern gothic rewrites the conventional perception of identity when it blurs the barriers between self and the other, unveiling the subject’s horror of broader crossing and terror of the abject’s threat to shape our identities: “While the freakish may always have inspired a complex mixture of fear and desire, […] they no longer represent images of what he memorably terms our ‘secret self’, but explicit shape our identities” (Spooner 66).
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