Between Gods and Ghosts: Gothic Resonances in Kavita Kane’s Mythological Narratives

Abstract

The Gothic and mythological retellings have the most in common when it comes to their shared focus on silenced voices and hidden truths. Gothic aesthetics focus on repression and haunting, while mythological retellings try to bring back points of view that have been hidden. Myths are shared memories, and telling them again often shows how violent they are. Gothic settings make this violence worse and show how it affects people over time. So, feminist retellings in Gothic style not only give women back their power, but they also show how trauma affects people across generations. By looking into the classic of Gothic literature by Jane Eyre and the contemporary mythological retellings of Kavita Kane, this article aims at looking into the intersection of these traditions. Myth places characters in the space between gods and people, while Gothic puts them in the space between life and death, sanity and insanity. The study proceeded by first establishing Jane Eyre as “a representation raw feminine instincts” by using gothic features. Then the presence of this literary technique will be analysed in the novels Ahalya’s Awakening (2021) and Lanka’s Princess (2017) by Kavita Kane.  This will be used in order to bring out the common interest in thresholds, which lets retellings use Gothic settings to make mythic battles more dramatic.