Voicing the Broken: Feminist Gothic Retellings in Gothic Poems to Love & Liberty

This paper explores the intersection of feminist literary criticism and Gothic poetics in Mason Carter’s Gothic Poems to Love & Liberty: A Collection of Poems on Myths & Broken Hearts. Through a close reading of selected poems—including reimaginings of Medusa, Yuki-onna, Cassandra, Phoenix, and Persephone—the study examines how Carter reconstructs classical and folkloric mythologies to center female subjectivity, emotional labor, and the politics of voice. Drawing on feminist theorists such as Julia Kristeva, Sandra Gilbert, and intersectional frameworks, the analysis identifies Gothic tropes such as spectrality, fragmentation, and silence as central to the collection’s mythic reclamations. The poems destabilize patriarchal narratives by granting agency to figures traditionally cast as monstrous, mad, or silenced. Furthermore, the work interrogates the burdens of prophecy, the exhaustion of survival, and the ambiguity of agency in mythic female experience. Ultimately, this paper argues that Carter’s collection functions as a feminist Gothic archive—a lyrical space where trauma, myth, and desire converge to articulate new forms of liberation rooted in brokenness rather than transcendence.