• In the late 20th and 21st centuries, a particular kind of sentiment grew in the arts, with a corresponding kind of story growing in tandem with it. This sentiment may be expressed by sentences such as:

  • Everyone is the hero from their own point of view.

  • When you are young you cheer for the hero; when you grow up, you understand the villain.

  • A hero is the villain in someone else’s story.
• The implication is that the old tales — fairy-stories, myths, classic books and films — are childish or simplistic. There was a push for “realistic” stories and “complex” characters.
• The underlying thesis seems to be that there are no born good or bad people and that a good story is a “complex” one.
• Meaning, the heroes must be troubled, morally ambiguous people, and the villains must have redeeming qualities and a sympathetic past that explains, if not excuses, their present actions
• Nowhere is this trend more visible than in “perspective flip” stories: the retelling of classic narratives from a point of view different than the hero’s, showing the “true story” behind the events the public is familiar with. The most popular characters to receive this treatment, of course, are the villains. Maleficent, Cruella, and probably most famous of all, Wicked.

• There is always the underlying message: the story you know is the official, sanitized, baby version. We are going to tell you what really happened, in all its gritty detail.

  Problem is, they rarely do so.
• The meta-narrative of these movies, that we are seeing the true story, is incoherent, for the simple fact that the story we are seeing is not the same as the original
• There is a deeper cultural commentary to be made (and has been made) of what the existence of these movie say about our society.

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• While young men are largely dominated by pornography, women, whether teenagers or adults, are now dominated by smutty, lustful media which is essentially pornography, though operating in different forms and with more toleration.
• it’s a well-known fact that pornography follows its consumers into their personal and romantic lives, changing the way they view themselves, others, and life itself.

• The illustrations of a fairytale are just as important as the text itself; illustrations should provoke curiosity and capture the story’s tone
• Good fairytale art inspires awe and imagination
• our modern age has banished fairytales to the realm of children
• truly lovely fairytale illustrations. But this is not the norm in the world of today’s fairytale publishing, specifically aimed at children
• he mere fact that a story as wonderful and enduring as Cinderella has cover art like this angers me. The impression I get from glancing at this cover of Little Red Riding Hood is that the wolf is not to be taken seriously, an assumption antithetical to the moral of the story.

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• For early Gothic writers, the house was often an ancient ruin, a literal pile of stone representing the decayed power of the old aristocracy and the crushing weight of history. The focus was entirely on the environment. The terror was external, a physical oppression.
• The house stopped being merely a setting and became a direct mirror or manifestation of the characters’ minds. The horror was no longer about escaping an exterior threat, but about confronting an interior decay. This is the era of the ‘Uncanny’, where the familiar was made frightening.
• Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’ is the quintessential example. The physical decay of the house parallels the mental and physical decay of the family line, making the house not just a setting, but a twin to Roderick Usher’s crumbling sanity. Later, Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw pushed this ambiguity further. The question becomes central: are the ghosts real, or are they a result of the governess’s repression and hysteria? The Victorian haunted house is a repository for unexamined desires and devastating secrets.

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• What makes the Southern Gothic different from other Gothic texts?
• The Grotesque: In this genre, the physical is almost always a roadmap for the moral. The Misfit (—a character with a physical deformity, a social eccentricity, or a psychological crack) becomes a symbol for the decay of the society surrounding them. (—this person is sometimes refered to as the ’freak’, as coined by Flannery O’Connor)
• The Setting: The landscape is a character rather than just a setting. Whether it is a crumbling antebellum mansion or a desolate, sun-bleached field, the setting feels alive, oppressive, and heavy with the weight of time.

• The Burden of History: Faulkner famously said:

  ”The past is never dead. It is not even past”
• This quote is like the North Star of Southern Gothic. The shadows of the Civil War, the institutional stain of slavery, and the rigidity of class structures are the ghosts that refuse to leave the room.

• • The Outsider: Most narratives center on the alienated figure—the person who sees the rot in the foundation but is powerless to repair it. They are often trapped by their environment, unable to escape the gravity of their own lineage.

  • Religion and Piety: There is an almost rhythmic juxtaposition between the sacred and the profane in Southern Gothic. The stories often look at how religious zealotry sits uncomfortably alongside dark, violent human impulses.
• Poe was the architect of this psychological erosion. In works like The Fall of the House of Usher, he established the doomed estate. This mansion literally and figuratively collapses under the weight of its own lineage and secrets. Similarly, stories like The Black Cat and Ligeia moved the Gothic inward. These stories had phantoms that did not roam the halls but instead consumed the mind. This era acted as the essential bridge, stripping away the chivalric veneer of Southern plantation life to reveal the rot underneath, proving that the American landscape was already ripe for horror.
• William Faulkner gave us the architecture of decay, using non-linear time and shifting perspectives to show how history suffocates the present. In The Sound and the Fury, the fragmented narrative reflects the internal disintegration of the Compson family, while Absalom, Absalom! explores how the obsession with lineage and racial status acts as a slow-acting poison on the land.
• Cormac McCarthy pulled the genre into the harsh, violent light of the border, proving that the Gothic sensibility could survive in the desert in works like Child of God.
• The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams: If you want the dramatic, theatrical heart of the genre, this play remains the gold standard for exploring the entrapment of memory and the fading glory of the Southern past.

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• Throughout history, the way the witch has been portrayed is a direct reflection of society’s deepest anxieties, control mechanisms, and, eventually, its dreams of liberation.
• In the ancient world, the witch was synonymous with chaos. Think of Homer’s Circe, who turned men into swine, or Ovid’s Medea, who navigated the intersections of love and betrayal. These women were practitioners of magic, but perhaps more importantly, they wielded power entirely independent of male authority.
• n the eyes of ancient writers, this was fundamentally dangerous. For the Greeks, these women weren’t necessarily evil as we think of evil today. It was more that she was a manifestation of the terrifying reality that not everything in the world could be governed by the laws of men (—how terrifying!). She was a reminder of a wilder, older world that required propitiation rather than control
• he is the danger lurking just outside the village, waiting to dismantle the family unit
• the witch was used as a vessel for justifying the persecution of the marginalised.
• By the 19th century, the witch undergoes a shift toward the Gothic, where she becomes a figure of inherited trauma and psychological decay. This era saw a fascination with occultism and the “otherness” of women who possessed intellectual or spiritual power.
• In F. Marion Crawford’s The Witch of Prague (1891) or H. Rider Haggard’s She (1887), for instance, we see the emergence of the witch as a figure of atmospheric mystery and dark capability.
• Victorian and Gothic writers explored the moral rot of their own communities, using the witch as a metaphor for the female ancestor whose voice was silenced, only to return as an atmospheric, haunting presence.
• less about celebrating the witch’s magic and more about critiquing the society that labeled her a monster in the first place.
• Modern literature has transformed the witch into the ultimate avatar for the outsider. Whether in YA fantasy or contemporary literary fiction, the witch now represents the intersectional, the rebel, and the self-actualized woman. This version of the witch serves as a symbol of radical autonomy. She is the woman who claims her power, defines her own morality, and creates her own community.

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• Historically, women’s labour force participation in Egypt peaked in the 1980s. This period coincided with guaranteed public-sector employment for educated graduates – an arrangement that benefitted women by offering job security, maternity benefits, and socially acceptable working conditions.

  Since then, FLFP has declined steadily, particularly among younger cohorts of educated women (Hendy 2026). Three structural shifts help explain this reversal:

  1. The contraction of public-sector hiring removed the single most important pathway into formal employment for educated women.
  2. Private-sector job growth has been concentrated in informal and low-quality employment, characterised by weak job security, long hours, and limited benefits – features that disproportionately deter women.
  3. Repeated macroeconomic shocks, including the 2016 currency devaluation and subsequent inflationary pressures, reduced real wages and raised the cost of working through higher transport and childcare expenses.