Abstract
Punter suggests that Gothic fiction “deals with those moments when we find it impossible, with any degree of hope, for our ‘case to be put” (Pathologies 5). Such helplessness dominates the texts of this chapter, which represent the subject positions of immigrants, refugees, psychiatric patients and other outsiders in an environment organised by war. As such, this chapter grapples with wartime adaptations of two traditional Gothic tropes: imprisonment and the struggle to decipher elusive signs. Anna Kavan’s short story anthology I Am Lazarus (1945), her novel Sleep Has His House (1948) and Graham Greene’s The Ministry of Fear (1943) construct the wartime city in terms of a carceral logic. This city is a menacing labyrinth in the grip of authorities who manipulate signs that fearful inhabitants cannot decipher. Both authors update key Gothic tropes for a period when confinement of outsiders took on dark new forms.
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