The imprisoning houses of Mr B and Lovelace are metamorphosed into a real medieval castle; tyrannical parents have become feudal princes; family secrets have become real skeletons in the cupboard; arguments in letters materialize into actual duels; contemporary England and the uncivilized barbarities of the Augustan metropolis have become the threatening precincts and tenebral cavities of a late medieval Italian fortress; a Providential universe has been translated into a world of dynastic feuding and historical determination.

If the appearance of Gothic suggests anything, it is some historical factor in this literary development, something which made the family a cultural pressure point.

The family, in its contemporary form, must not be understood as a social, economic, and political structure of alliance that excludes or at least restrains sexuality … On the contrary, its role is to anchor sexuality and provide it with permanent support … [S]ince the eighteenth century the family has become the obligatory locus of affects, feelings, love; that sexuality has its privileged point of development in the family; that for this reason sexuality is “incestuous” from the start.