Episode 16: Gothic and the Illusion of Freedom

**What if freedom is an illusion, and every escape simply exchanges one set of constraints for another?** We imagine freedom as life without barriers: enough money to go anywhere, enough courage to leave everything behind, or an open wilderness where no one can tell us what to do. But does that kind of freedom actually exist? Beginning with a lottery billboard I passed on my way to cancer surgery, this episode explores the difference between freedom and agency, and the possibility that what we call freedom is merely the successful exchange of intolerable constraints for tolerable ones. Through Jack London’s “In a Far Country” and Velma Wallis’s *Two Old Women* — two non-Gothic works containing powerful Gothic elements — we consider what happens when people leave civilization behind, only to discover that the wilderness imposes its own demands. If you write gothic fiction or you want to, my structural guides and workbooks are over at Gothic Writing Studio on Etsy. Serious tools for serious writers. *Gothic Writing Studio — structural guides and workbooks for serious gothic fiction writers:*⁠⁠ www.etsy.com/shop/GothicWritingStudio⁠⁠ *Or a how to write Gothic Fiction book on Amazon: Writing Gothic Fiction — From Classic Castles to Southern Shadows:* https://a.co/d/00hF844E