Gothic music and literature share a fascination with women. In their male-driven conceptions of femininity, women often become stand-ins for caricatures of violence, sexual desire, and existential hopelessness. Gothic music’s relative modernity (1980 onwards) has however offered its medium a chance to expand beyond its literary roots in 18th century gender roles. The relative flexibility within the genre’s artistic breadth on behalf of the democratization of music as an artform facilitates a paradigm that sits between idealized femme figures of gothic roots, and modern feminism. Three songs, “A Person Isn’t Safe Anywhere These Days,” “A Forest,” and “Xavier” by The Chameleons, The Cure, and Dead Can Dance, respectively display gothic music’s spectrum when considering women and their role in lyrical content. Through analysis of their lyricism, (as sonic qualities are harder to convey) it will be shown how gothic music incorporates woman as expedients to convey fear or desire, and as dynamic figures.
	The Chameleons’ “A Person Isn’t Safe Anywhere These Days” holistically projects the fear of living within a society without a moral or physical protector. The “Man of steel” wishfully described in comic books does not exist within the world of The Chameleons. From all angles, society contains danger mentally and physically to the narrator. His inclusion of the line “What kind of times are these,” indicates the temporarily of this problem being relatively recent -- drawing perhaps directly from the 1980s British neoliberal Thatcher regime which saw the collapse of factories and manufacturing communities. The entire album explicates a sort of existential anxiety, but the specificity of this time period trumping others in danger indicates a direct connection between the collapse of familial structures in light of unemployment. The “Man of Steel” lyric may be linked to the failings of government to correct these problems, contributing to the domestic crisis.
	Narrative fear on behalf of collapsing familial structures - which threatens masculinity - from unemployment immediately feeds into a feminine personification. The song opens with a depiction of a woman, poetically being murdered “To the sound of splintered glass”. Electing to convey an omnipresent danger through the event of a woman being ‘murdered’ implies that the fragile, feminine character exists to display tragedy. Similar to archaic gothic tales such as “Ligeia,” the death of a woman serves as an expedient to access the psyche of a grief stricken narrator. Essentially, her rhetorical usage derives purely from her ability to draw out emotion from a narrator. 
The death’s significance, however, evokes little sympathy on behalf of the woman given the song structure. Rather, the narrator, referred to as “You,” (the woman is “She”) possess more dynamic narrative presence. 
These sympathetic lines encourage, rather than condemn, the narrator -- almost painting him as the victim rather than the woman he evidently killed. 
