Abstract
This paper is an attempt at a psychoanlytical interpretation of the story, The Poor Clare, along with some other gothic stories by her. It tries to explain the heroine, Lucy's double in terms of the mental disease called Psychological Trauma Stress Disease, the cause of which is rooted in a traumatic experience through which the multiple-personality patient has gone in her childhood. The phenomenon called a curse can be understood as a repressed desire as her voluptuous double----a paraxial image of its obsessive chastitiy. The plot in the story develops in an inhibitious 18th century society whose traditional and aristocratic values are based on fears that women who are not treated as child will fall into loathsome lechery. "The fantastic" in the Gothic pieces by Gaskell can be, in our view, represented as an alternative world as discussed in some feminist criticism.
