THE REEK OF HUMAN BLOOD SMILES OUT OF ME

Phantom Hands: Brent Barrett

collapse of the Real

Kenneth MacMillan, Mayerling

Paul Marque and Hohyun Kang

When we speak of the body in relation to the Gothic, we tend to focus on the destructive and the disruptive. We speak of mutilation, desecration and annihilation. However, there is one aspect of the Gothic which usually goes unnoticed—the act of preservation. After all, Gothicism is associated with the past—and what is the past if not a repository of the memories of lost time? Be it an ancestral curse, a ruined mansion, a familial secret, a demented aristocrat, or a decayed body in a closet, the Gothic always preserves. It may be seen as a form of taxidermy: the taxidermy of the spatial, the temporal, the psychological, and the corporeal.

Subarna Mondal, “‘Did he smile his work to see?’—Gothicism, Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho and the art of taxidermy”