Author: Leslie A. Fiedler

Cited by

• Ray Russell (1)
  • IN: Haunted Castles: The Complete Gothic Stories (1959) Fiction, American
    EPIGRAPH: Beneath the haunted castles lies the dungeon keep: the womb from whose darkness the ego first emerged, the tomb to which it knows it must return at last. Beneath the crumbling shell of paternal authority, lies the maternal blackness, imagined by the Gothic writer as a prison, a torture chamber -- from which the cries of the kidnapped anima cannot even be heard. The upper and the lower levels of the ruined castle or abbey represent the contradictory fears at the heart of Gothic terror: the dread of the super-ego, whose splendid battlements have been battered but not quite cast down -- and of the id, whose buried darkness abounds in dark visions no stormer of the castle had ever touched.
    FROM: Love and Death in the American Novel, (1960), Book, US