Reading Lamentations Through the Lens of Gothic Literature

There are few books in Scripture that feel as haunted as Lamentations. Its verses tremble with catastrophe; a destroyed city, a defiled temple, a scattered people, and a God who, though not absent, has withdrawn into silence. To read Lamentations through the lens of Gothic literature is not (I hope!) a forced experiment in genre-crossing, but a recovery of a shared emotional landscape; one in which ruin, terror, and silence converge.

The Aesthetic of Ruin

From Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764) onward, the Gothic has been preoccupied with the aesthetic of decay, so crumbling castles and the ghostly persistence of the past within the present In Lamentations, Jerusalem itself becomes such an architectural ruin, “How lonely sits the city that once was full of people!” (1:1). The stones themselves becomes relics. The grandeur of the city’s past haunts the desolation of the present, much as the Gothic castle bears witness to a glory extinguished.

Similarly, in Gothic fiction, ruins are never merely physical. They are material embodiments of loss, guilt, and divine judgment. The decay of Manderley in Rebecca or the collapsing house in Poe’s The Fall of the House of Usher externalise an interior unraveling. In Lamentations, the ruined city is the outward manifestation of covenantal collapse. The laments are not nostalgia for lost power, but grief for a broken relationship. The ruin of Jerusalem stands as testimony to both divine holiness and human fragility. This is a theology of loss written in rubble, shared through poetry.

The Gothic fascination with ruins also carries a paradoxical beauty, or something like awe of standing before what overwhelms (Burke, 1757). Lamentations lives in that same tension. Each chapter is an attempt to impose order upon chaos in the wake of loss. The result is strangely beautiful; devastation rendered poetic, or horror made liturgical. Like the Gothic novelist, the poet finds form in fear.

Divine Haunting

One of the most Gothic dimensions of Lamentations is its theology of divine hiddenness. The voice that once thundered from Sinai is now silent. The divine presence lingers like a ghost, felt more in absence than in appearance.

In The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), Ann Radcliffe’s heroines wander through shadowed corridors, haunted by presences they cannot name. The terror lies not in overt evil but in unknowing, and a lingering question of what remains unseen. Similarly, the lamenter speaks as one trapped within divine shadow: “He has walled me about so that I cannot escape; he has made my chains heavy” (Lam 3:7). God is both captor and absent rescuer, both the terror and the only hope.

Here, Lamentations anticipates what the Gothic would later articulate: that fear can coexist with devotion, and that love of the divine may persist even when the divine feels monstrous, or at least absent.

Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) captures this tension in the creature’s cry to his creator; a plea for recognition that echoes the lamenter’s prayer. The relationship between God and Jerusalem is marked by both longing and horror, as the beloved city confronts her divine maker’s wrath. “See, O LORD, and consider: to whom have you done this?” (Lam. 2:20). The Gothic question, “Who made me, and why do I suffer?”, is keenly here.

Corpse and Witness

Gothic fiction often anthropomorphises architecture (castles that groan, portraits that bleed), just as Lamentations does with Jerusalem. The city is described as a widow (1:1), as a woman whose filth clings to her skirts (1:9), as a violated body crying for justice (1:21–22). The city is not merely destroyed but desecrated. This personification transforms lament into Gothic horror. The sacred city becomes both victim and a symbol of a decaying body that still bears traces of former holiness.

The poet, meanwhile, becomes a kind of Gothic witness, one who survives the catastrophe but cannot escape its memory. The laments are both testimony and haunting. Like Poe’s narrator in The Raven (1845), he cannot stop speaking, yet every word deepens the echo. The structure, looping from Aleph to Tav, mirrors the compulsive return to grief. The alphabet itself becomes a graveyard of memory.

Faith Among the Ruins

In Dracula (Stoker, 1897), Bram Stoker reimagined fear as a form of faith distorted, or even the sacred inverted as horror. Lamentations works in reverse by reclaiming fear as faith’s companion. It does not deny the terror of divine judgment; but sanctifies it, “The Lord is righteous, for I have rebelled against his command” (1:18). This is not passive resignation but the acceptance of awe, what the Hebrews would have called Yirat Adonai (the fear of the LORD). In Gothic terms, it is the moment when the haunted soul realises that the ghost is holy.

Ultimately, Lamentations offers no resolution, only endurance and mourning. The Gothic rarely ever resolves its hauntings either. It teaches us to dwell within them and to find meaning in the ruins. Where modern approaches to piety might seek immediate consolation, Lamentations allows grief to linger on and potentially shape faith through absence. As the poet writes, “It is good to wait quietly for the salvation of the LORD” (3:26).

The Sacred Gothic

To read Lamentations through the Gothic imagination is to recognise the deep kinship between deep, grief-filled lament and the aesthetics of the awe and wonder. In a world eager to move from darkness to light without pause, Lamentations insists on lingering among the ruins, where faith is not the absence of fear but its sanctification.

Perhaps this is why Lamentations continues to speak with such strange modern power. It reminds us that holiness is not always radiant, but sometimes ruinous, and just like the Gothic novel, it invites us not to flee from the haunted spaces of faith, but to walk through them with reverent dread, whispering into the silence: “Great is your faithfulness.”

Burke, E. (1990) A philosophical enquiry into the origin of our ideas of the sublime and beautiful. Oxford: Oxford University Press. (First published 1757).

Du Maurier, D. (2001) Rebecca. London: Penguin. (First published 1938).

Poe, E.A. (1984) The fall of the House of Usher and other writings. London: Penguin. (First published 1839).

Poe, E.A. (1845) ‘The Raven’, American Review, February 1845.

Radcliffe, A. (2008) The mysteries of Udolpho. Oxford: Oxford University Press. (First published 1794).

Shelley, M. (1994) Frankenstein; or, The modern Prometheus. Oxford: Oxford University Press. (First published 1818).

Stoker, B. (1997) Dracula. Oxford: Oxford University Press. (First published 1897).

Walpole, H. (2004) The castle of Otranto. Oxford: Oxford University Press. (First published 1764).