As Anne Williams has noted, the Gothic has systematically structured its narratives around the concept of the Other (1995, 18). While an ever-changing set of Gothic conventions can express many dimensions of otherness, it nonetheless exists as a cognitive structure that has informed the medieval and barbarous in Walpole's Otranto (1995, 20), through to the monstrously unnatural in Stoker's Dracula (1995, 21). Notions of otherness are broadly consistent with some of the most ancient categories of otherness in Western culture and can be traced back to Pythagorean binaries – employed by Aristotle in The Metaphysics – which describe reality according to such opposites as male/female, straight/curved, right/left, light/darkness, or good/evil (Williams 1995, 18–19). Since there is a privileging in these binary categories that denotes the dominant aspect of the opposition as superior, cultural assumptions have developed in Western discourse that attribute the subordinate aspect of the opposition with a lesser status. These subordinate categories have informed the overall Gothic tendency to revel in this shadowy realm, the realm that Aristotle referred to as “the line of evil,” of which transgression and taboo seem apt manifestations (Williams 1995, 19). One of the organizing principles of The Castle of Otranto, for instance, is an otherness that positions the dark ages as a time of barbarity and superstition, set in indisputable contrast to the “enlightened and civilized” period in which the novel was produced (Williams 1995, 20). Frankenstein and Dracula similarly pivot around a binary logic which manifests as a predilection for darkness over light and thus attributes both respective figures with powerful Gothic potential through an association with the clandestine, the supernatural, and dark corrupted morality (Williams 1995, 21).