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Most of us in modern society are only vaguely aware of the actual history of gothic influence. Given the information most readily available, we have a tendency instead to associate it primarily with our own cultural experiences. The most commonly associated Gothic images in this country are of dark castles, haunting flesh-and-blood personages, and the primary fear: unwanted invasion of the psyche. In many gothic tales the act of assaulting the psyche was through the narration of dark family secrets that often span generations, clandestine relationships and inappropriate associations. These are obscured or protected by the families themselves or the culture in which they take place, much to the detriment of the characters, which they surround. Edgar Allan Poe's "The Fall of the House of Usher," Angela Carter's "The Lady of the House of Love," and William Faulkner's "A Rose for Emily" are all stories that portray the characters as being imprisoned and eventually destroyed by their family secrets.

Each has a different author, a different setting and take place in different times. Yet even more frightening than the physical settings in which they take place, all of them started and ended within the clutches of a dark, inescapable history of ancestral secrets whose tentacles reached out through time to seal the fate of the characters long before the actual events take place.
Family situations, lineage, and sexual considerations are all addressed in the three stories mentioned above. The characters have distinct issues with delineating the line between where their lives begin and their families lives end. In each of the stories mentioned, the characters are all deeply bound to their family history in physical, emotional and psychological ways.
These works also vary in how they address the reality of social conscience. The "Fall of the House of Usher" was written in 1839, and is a narration placed within a narrow framework of time. The lives of these characters are portrayed only within a social context that is historical in nature. Their present state is compared only to that of the previous ancestors, who were highly social and well-known figures in their social environment, yet we know little of the effect their presence had on the surrounding community. "The Lady of the House of Love" is a more contemporary piece, written in 1979 that is more firmly set in a physical time and place. There are references made throughout to areas in a contemporary country setting

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