The Gothic as Semiotic Disruption: Layers and Levels of Terror and the Abject in Mary Wilkins Freeman’s “The Wind in the Rose-bush”

The rebellious Gothic supernatural leads to the abject horror of Freeman’s tale as it depicts the maternal as a space of contradictions, of abjections, of “aggressivity and death.” The Radcliffean Gothic results in the heroine fearing other humans. The Gothic elements in Freeman’s tale unmask the terror that one must fear the mother.