Literary Psychology.

Y: We start with the Gothic genre, for where else; the Gothic genre is the domain of individual emotional experience; it belongs to Psychology.

Y: We then move onto what the Gothic genre is, exactly, and its relationship to madness.  In Gothic fiction, scenes are swelled from normality and brim with drama - an interesting distinction (albeit ultimately incidental) being whether or not this drama perceived from the supposedly fantastic  exists within itself a priori or indeed whether it is applied perceptually from the observer in question.

Y: Next we irrevocably come to the mindset of the typical Actor in a Gothic context.

X: No quotations?

Y: Who takes pain to use quotations mid-speech?  Quotations, references, and other academic conventions are relics of written communication; their existence and convention being in itself demonstrative on the limitations of human processing in a conversational context; limitations both mechanically - inherent within our psychological machinery - and practically, regards the bewildering subtractive social forces the mind is relentlessly victim to each day during social intercourse. -- Anyway, the typical mentality of the actor.

X: As in, the mentality you think it has.

Y: Given my understanding of it thus far, yes.  The Actor is, at least at first consideration, typically emotionally dubious; reactions to things supposedly deemed 'fantastic' (i.e., dramatic) are apparently somewhat disproportionate relative to the 'value' attributed them in the perception of the same object of most other individuals.  The Actor however sees in them something almost penetrative.  The breath is stolen and the heart is stabbed; this experience of 'being moved' - a giddy, enormous feeling by which such a short phrase hardly does it justice - within day to day experience seems to happen when worldview (expectations and sense of reality applied to the physical world;  'I think the idea of this is beautiful')  and actual experience of that world (when the Actor rests eyes or otherwise experiences something which seems in its existence to support this 'take' on the world) essentially, overlap.

X: How are they emotionally dubious?

Y: Because their mentality - emotional stability, identity stability - seem generally unstable and their hold on reality notoriously slippery.

An apologist for the Actor's mindset would say however that this seems quite in line with human experience; the world is at it is insofar as the many vicissitudes of brain-states dictates: for instance on one's sense of time: if one is sleeping,  high,  or otherwise experiencing an abnormal physiological brain-state different from the day-to-day norm, the apologist would argue that the Actor's reality literally 'is' ever-changing and fluid, and that given such physiological variation and subsequent experiential fluidity, such reality is hardly 'dubious'.   Those with interests existing independent from vested emotional belief however (as is the case with the apologist) - science, in all of its impersonal glory - speak differently.

We notice that the individual differs from the majority in this respect; in their experiential emotional intensity, if you will.

X: [amused] I shall.

Y: Glad to hear.

X: So let me try and clarify; this 'Actor' - the typical character within the Gothic genre, who is (conceptually) perfectly capable of existing in 'real life' -  feels, or possesses a capacity to feel, a greater emotional intensity than most.

Y: Quite so.

X: What else?

Y: [thinks]... In person, they are probably usually quite furtive in general social intercourse; though should nature flash her colours and demonstrate her might - a storm, a fire, a tossing sea, perhaps - then their true colours show and the shyness will dissolve away immediately.  Actually, the relationship between the Actor and nature is an interesting one I haven't yet touched on.

I have said earlier that the Actor feels often vastly 'moved' by 'dramatic' objects.  Nature is the most interesting object of sorts in this respect, and also most formidable - as opposed to say, an example of architecture - usually in its sheer 'naturalness'; namely, that no choice has been involved in its physical location.  It has not chosen to be there, and, arguably - at least to the Actor - has a far greater right to exist and be the way it is and does more than, say, a person who has 'chosen' to be there and act a certain way.  Specifically, nature 'just exists', and the Actor attributes a huge amount of value and respect to this; they feel as though they are glimpsing 'wild and untamed' nature as it is and indeed as it should be.

So, Nature as an object contains (latent) emotional potential.  However, this emotional potential only carries any emotional currency when backed by the incidence of Nature rearing her might; something powerful - as above, say, a storm.  Otherwise, whilst beautiful, I think nature is generally seen as rather innocuous.  A postcard is pretty, not exciting.