Two Old Women

I have chosen to share this idea from two powerful works that are set in the northern wilderness.

Jack London's short story, In a Far Country, and Vilma Wallace's Two Old Women.

But neither of these is a Gothic work.

In a far country, it belongs to the wilderness and adventure fiction, while Two Old Women is based on an Athabascan legend of survival, but both contain gothic elements of extreme isolation, bodily vulnerability, hostile landscapes, fear, hunger, and the breakdown of the familiar world.

But more importantly, both of these stories strip away the illusion that leaving civilization makes a person free.

You see, in Jack London's In a Far Country, two men, Carter Wetherby and Percy Cuthbert, travel north during the Klondike Gold Rush.

In reality, it had been protecting them from the wilderness and from parts of themselves they had never been forced to confront.

They chose the far country because it appeared to promise freedom, but they merely exchanged the constraints of ordinary society for conditions they couldn't survive.