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This article elucidates an aspect of the formal use Gothic fiction makes of space.1 It explores the complex and confusing area in between spaces. After discussing examples of spatial ambiguity from several genres, and briefly outlining some narrative 'geometries' employed by Gothic, the article concentrates on a segment from Ann Radcliffe's The Italian in order to show how precisely the use of thresholds can elicit numinous terror, and so, in what way the threshold is vital to the construction of Gothic fiction. The discussion of Gothic spaces is rounded off with a close analogy from the field of contemporary mathematics which clarifies Gothic liminalization techniques.2
Most Radcliffe and Gothic criticism published over the last quarter of a century gravitates around ideological concerns. Marxist, feminist, psychoanalytical, sociocultural approaches rule, whereas scant attention is paid to more formal aspects such as writing technique; for one example, aside from a stimulating paragraph in Robert Miles' introduction to The Italian (2000), I know of no approaches to Radcliffe's use of free indirect style. Another surprisingly untilled field of study is the use of space by Gothic writers. This is surprising, because the tangibility of place is a central preoccupation of Gothic, and has remained important to the horror genre even after Gothic was superseded by the more psychology-oriented horror fiction favoured by the Victorians. To be sure, Gothic buildings engage critics in discussions of sublimity, feudal values, patriarchal oppression or feminine issues, but the physical structure of home, castle or abbey remains unattended. All too often, symbolic readings of Gothic architecture overlook its concrete presence; for one example, in Kate Ferguson Ellis's The Contested Castle (1989), castle stands for home (that is, household, not house), and home for a familiar, sociopolitical setting in which issues of domestic control and women's power elide those pertaining to the materiality and structure of the edifice.
Needless to say, these approaches have taught us much about socio-political, historical and gender issues in Gothic since the 1980s. Furthermore, it should be a truism that, by itself, formal analysis is a most sterile discipline unless it leads to insight. But how is horror produced on the page? What textual mechanisms account for emotion? By what sleight of hand do writers get readers to collude with...