Alison Milkbank: "Gothic fiction tells us the truth about our divided nature"

• "The taste for Gothic fiction begins in the Enlightenment period, when the truth claims of religion were being questioned."
• "Maidens fleeing from the rapacious hands of murderous monks ... represent for many the attempt to escape from the constrictions of Christian belief" 
• "The eeriness of two selves where there should only be one is, Freud argued, an irruption of disquiet caused by our separation from our origin in our mother's womb."
• " in showing us the darkness of the double self the Gothic, for all its horror and terror, tells us the truth: we are all Cain and Abel: "the whole seed of Adam, not divided/ But fearfully joined in the darkness of the double self"