This chapter uses the work of Charles Taylor to frame the way in which time operates in the early Gothic. Taylor follows Friedrich Schiller in describing the cleavage between the modern and pre-modern worlds as the difference between ‘naïve’ enchantment and ‘sentimental’ disenchantment (‘radical reflexivity’, as Taylor terms it). Enchanted subjectivity was ‘porous’, meaning that the self had no defences beyond magic to regulate against animistic intrusions. Modern subjectivity, by contrast, is ‘buffered’. For Taylor, the Romantic period was that moment in which the process of disenchantment completed itself as a widely accepted, scarcely noted, norm. From across the unbridgeable divide of radical reflexivity, Gothic writers imagine encounters with an enchanted world where time is represented either as ‘kairotic knots’ affording glimpses into higher times that radically shift the subjectivity of the protagonist, or as senseless repetitions undermining the linear logic of modern character development. The chapter demonstrates how this dynamic plays out in three canonical Gothic texts: Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho, Gottfried Bürger’s ‘Lenore’ and S. T. Coleridge’s ‘Christabel’.

Chapter 3 examines the creation of the image of God, pointing to the significance of the materiality and visibility of the image when compared with the invisibility of angels. This relates to how Gregory depicts the image of God as divine. Due to his narration of how God mixes the spiritual image with the dust, we shall see that Gregory portrays the image and the dust as becoming a unity, and thus a single, living human person. Drawing from Genesis 1, Gregory argues explicitly that God creates women and men equally as images of God; moreover he writes about the female image in a manner which demonstrates further his view of the image quite literally as a physical, living and divine image of God.