Gothic Elements In Shutter Island

Setting is the key element in Gothic Literature. It displays the different places and architectures that are essentials to visualize Gothic. The setting is highly significant in a Gothic novel because it helps to add horror and fear to its mood and dreadful weakness to its characters. As said by Snodgrass, the settings of Gothic literary works present an extensional symbolic psychological case to its human characters (158).Gothic fictions are usually set in isolated landscapes or highly secured prisons, secret passages or corridors, old castles or ghostly houses, and graveyards. According to Hogle, Gothic areas might be "a castle, a foreign place, an abbey, a vast prison, a subterranean crypt, a graveyard, a primeval frontier, or island, a large old house or theatre. . . (2)." In the past, most of Gothic works take place in castles. But in modern times, they are set in caves, covert passageways or tour where it can be easy to draw horrifying images of supernatural or gloomy unexplainable events such as ghosts and weird scary spirits. The setting of Shutter Island includes lots of Gothic elements represented in the island itself in addition to its surroundings such as the lighthouse, caves, secretive passages, highly secured prisons, graveyard, and ferry. Islands evolve stories ' characters to extreme isolation either physically or emotionally to a much wider range than other locations. It introduces fright and dread for it can be a dark and gloomy uninhabited landscape,