'In Gothic fiction, Angela Carter wrote in 1974, 'characters and events are exaggerated beyond reality, to become symbols, ideas, passions...style will tend to become ornate and unnatural- and thus operate against the perennial human desire (especially to Britain) to believe the word as fact...(the Gothic) retains a singular moral function- that of provoking unease.'
Christopher Frayling, 'Introduction', in Gothic Reader- A Critical Anthology
This extract furthers our interpretation that Carter has created her characters to shock and cause the reader unease by giving her characters extreme mannerisms to make the reader feel uncomfortable. After all, the Gothic is an exploration of the supernatural, the unnatural, something that the reader is not comfortable with because it is the unknown. The reader also feels uncomfortable when they realise that the characters and events are an embodiment of a bigger debate, such as feminism.
Carter argues the Gothic deliberately portrays something unnatural, to 'operate against' the human desire to believe everything we read. This means that we can questions the fairy tales that we were told as children, linking to Bruno Bettelheim's 'Fairy Tales and The Existential Predicament'.
Carter's portrayal of a young girl stuck in the role of a vampire 'provokes unease' in the reader, as we sympathise with 'the maiden', an unnaturally beautiful young girl, cursed by her family's heritage, forced into a role which isolates her from the rest of society.
