ABSTRACT
As the essays in this volume clearly demonstrate, children’s Gothic has become prevalent enough as a phenomenon to represent what can be considered a cultural symptom—an indicator that points to an underlying trauma, oft en in such a displaced or condensed way that there is no apparent link between the trauma and its symptom. Interpretations of symptoms always operate as limits, that is, to give an interpretation is to limit what most likely has multiple meanings to the one or two meanings the interpretation generates. Th is is, in part, one of the reasons why knowing what a symptom means, according to a particular interpretation, doesn’t make it go away. What interpretations can do, however, is make a symptom more interesting, or less threatening; they can make us less likely to try to censor or eradicate a symptom that isn’t really hurting anyone and is in fact helping certain people to cope with the circumstances of their lives, and allow us to enjoy it. Th is essay takes such an approach: my goal is to look at children’s Gothic as a symptom, to explore some of the possible traumas that produce the Gothic as symptom, and to suggest how the Gothic may help children cope with those traumas in an indirect fashion.
