Explore the significance of entrapment in Gothic texts

Explore the significance of entrapment in Gothic texts

Entrapment in Gothic literature implies that escape is highly improbable, for either character or readers, and is therefore the predecessor for terror. In all Gothic texts, entrapment is highly prevalent; whether mentally or physically.

In ‘The Lady of the House of Love’, Angela Carter creates a “waiflike” Miss Havisham-like female protagonist who is both sleeping beauty and the vampiric villain from Jack and the Beanstalk. Through using these original fairy tale forms, Carter’s female villain is presented as trapped “sobbing in a derelict bedroom” but also trapping her own victims- “vous serez ma proie”. Angela Carter presents the Lady as an inverted Lady of Shallot, bound by curse to stay in the Chateaux. The “cracked mirror” later shatters and “breaks the wicked spell” as does the mirror in Tennyson’s neo-Medieval poem. This could perhaps show the Lady breaking free of the two stereotypes that she has been assigned to herself but this seems out of place with her feminist critiques as seen from her other short stories. Using allusions to the poem, it is more likely therefore that Carter is employing it to depict enlightenment. As the Lady of Shallot states she is “half sick of shadows”, the town is plagued by “too many shadows…that have no source in anything visible”. Although the Lady of Shalott is freed from the curse by love and then paid the price with her life, the Lady in this story, although now in love, is freed from her superstitious and logic-defying existence by reason- a boy entirely rational. The boy with his bicycle- “pure reason applied to motion”- is a symbol of reason who acts as a kind of enlightenment “exorcism” or “hero”. The Lady’s trapped existence in the supernatural is further shown by her description as a “cave full of echoes”. An echo is a particularly lonely sound which continues long after the sound has been made, linking to the Lady’s “perpetual repetition of their (her ancestor’s) passions”. This cave is another allusion, this time to Plato’s cave allegory which depicts a prisoner escaping from a cave of shadows and ignorance to one of enlightenment and truth. Moreover, the boy even blinds the vampiric Lady with his logical brightness- “golden light of the summer’s day”- as the sun does to the prisoner in the allegory. Angela Carter’s use of the entrapment and setting free of a supernatural vampire is her way of turning her short story into an allegory demonstrating how reason and logic can conquer vampires- “the perfect metaphor for our fears”. The acceptance and emancipation of our fears is what, paradoxically, our fears really want, the Lady wishes to be human and has “horrible reluctance for her role”. 

Although Carter is wishing to depict reason triumphing over our passionate fears, Carter’s hero retains a supernatural and illogical “souvenir” suggesting that the world can still retain and accept that something other but not let the fear of it rule us. Despite not being a feminist message, it goes without saying that the allegory can be universally taken aboard. Carter’s use of entrapment in her Gothic, allegorical short story questions whether the “Gothic eternity of the Vampires”’ “cards can fall in a new pattern”, “can a bird learn a new song?” and can the age-old fear of the unknown be emancipated for the benefit of everybody?

Carter’s feminist stance is made room for in this story through the Lady’s self- imposed entrapment. She says how who likes to hear her pet lark “announce that it cannot escape”. This is typical of the archetypal Gothic femme fatale who seems to enjoy the trapping of innocent creatures. However, she only enjoys holding power over the lark’s freedom because she herself is trapped. The metaphor for herself as a “metal woman” is apt at depicting her as a cage- a woman of bars. This shows that she is trapped of her own accord and is Carter’s vehicle for describing how women need to escape these self-made cages women have made for themselves and “learn to run with the tigers”. The Lady is said to look like a child “putting on the clothes of her dead mother in order to bring her, however briefly, back to life”. This reinforces Carter’s view that women return and dress up in old stereotypes for comfort. However this “metal woman” links directly to the boy’s description of her as a “ghost in a machine”. The boy’s rational perception of her as a “machine” or non-real metal woman completes the conception that fear has “dressed up” and become “self-articulated”- the ghost needs to be set free.

In ‘Dr Faustus’, Marlowe presents redemption and belief in God as a trap. Faustus is doomed to fail from the very start of the play, exacerbated in the morality tale structure which ensures its audience that the protagonist will be punished and his “pleasures suac’d with pain”. In the first chorus, it is said that the “heavens conspir’d his overthrow”. This implies that God planned his damned demise from the very starts- “conspired” connoting deception. This pre-planned doom is rather Calvinistic, Marlowe perhaps criticising the predestination principle and showing how Faustus was not in control of his actions at all but a mere plaything for higher orders. Faustus’ “custom is not to deny” the Duke of Vanholt, Lucifer and Mephistopheles and becomes a conjuring clown for these- “his artful sport drives all dad thought away”. Although he believes himself to be in control, he is certainly not. He is controlled and dammed whichever path he chooses to “fly”- trapped. This view of a malicious God fits in with Marlowe’s supposed atheism- believing that belief is “an illusion, fruits of lunacy”. It also presents religion as defensive and insecure, reflective of the rising challenge to religion and the disloyalty surrounding it. Faustus’ description of one particular building he sees in his devilish travelling shows that his Renaissance and radical thinking is a threat to the established, religious order- “a sumptuous temple stands which threats the stars with her aspiring top”. God and his heavens respond to this aspiring individual’s threatening existence and trap him between a rock and a hard place. As does Faustus pay for his radicalism, so later does Marlowe. Both “practice more than heavenly power permits”.

Frankenstein is entrapped within prison in chapter 21, symbolic of his entrapment by guilt and responsibility. After he is believed to be the murderer of Clerval- “ah” Beloved friend!” – Frankenstein is incarcerated in a cell in Ireland. Ironically, he is found guilty of no crimes and set free despite raving over the deaths of his family at his own hands. Frankenstein, in a “wretched mockery of justice”, is reliving what Justine must have experienced when she was wrongly convicted of murder. Frankenstein is so consumed with his “darkness that pressed around him” that he doesn’t seem to recognise this fateful working of justice, stating that “he was spared the disgrace of appearing publicly as a criminal”. “Disgrace” is the least of his worries, and he is portrayed unsympathetically here, seemingly still concerned with his image and not his past crimes or guilt. The cell he is held in also represents his internal escapeless depression. During his prolonged lamentations, he concludes that “the walls of a dungeon or a palace were alike hateful” and “a prison was as welcome residence as the divinest scene in nature”. To him, the pursuance of the monster- a living reminder of his responsibilities and guilt- has made his whole life a dungeon or form of entrapment. The fear and “unnatural horror” of this are apparently “the inmates of his breast”. This refusal to give the key to these inmates and to accept his responsibility and the Monster’s relentless pursuit for justice leads to a dramatic no-man’s land setting in the arctic which is distinctly amoral and entrapping for both characters.

Entrapment in these three texts reminds the reader that we are all captive of something we have created for ourselves. Its usage in all three texts evokes typically gothic terror and claustrophobia, and presents the reader with something ‘other’ they can find no exit from and are forced to confront.