Drawing back to the temporality of the song, and the ‘crisis of masculinity’ deriving from the collapse of the nuclear family, these chorused lines can be read under the scope of a tragic male figure. Pressured by the economy’s externalities, he decides to forcefully react and murder a woman for the sake of retaining power. This explanation becomes morbid in its narrative sympathies; while not completely approving of the narrator, the song considers the narrator’s crime more tragic than the death of a woman. In other words, collapsing masculinity supersedes the importance of a woman’s death. 
 Closing with dichotomy, the song offers redemption and sympathy to the figure through his placement in the rain, a common weather trope related to character reform, but also questions the morality of the character in attempting to ‘laugh’ his crime away. 
Generally, the song conveys a robust fear about changing dynamics through the expedient of a woman’s death. Gothic traits of mental anguish and the death of an innocent, beautiful figure reveal themselves early -- the woman’s introduction immediately depends on her physicality as she “parts her greying hair”. In this gothic song, the woman was never meant to be a character, but a manifestation to demonstrate the lengths at which existential dread may affect a male.
Women as a projection of male psychology continues within The Cure’s “A Forest,” although far less violently. Here, a ethereal female figure progresses through a metaphorical forest, eluding a man endlessly. Desire epitomizes this song, as the narrator’s desperation to find this woman - or any woman - builds. His recommendation to “See into the trees / Find the girl while you can” explicates the song’s two focuses: the archetype of the forest, and an elusive romantic desire. Setting the song in the forest creates a confusing ‘space,’ similar to castles of classic gothic literature. Here, the forest employs a confusing, dark tone -- the narrator’s confusion throughout the song amplifies as he continues to search for this mysterious ‘girl.’ 
The aesthetic value of the forest revives the dark settings of the castle, and causes the author to rely more on senses besides seeing -- like hearing. 
The eventual abandonment of visual senses indicates a conception based more mentally (hallucinatory) than physically -- her perception eludes him because this ‘girl’ either directly evades him, or exists as a phantom manifestation of the narrator’s mind. The closing repetition of “Into the Trees” in the second verse confounds the desperate and confused tone of the song, reminding the listener of the perspective of the story. A ‘forest’ may be an enclosed mental or mystical space, rather than a physical entity. 

Once again, a nameless, speechless, and ill-described character exists as an expedient for a male emotion -- in this case, desire. Confusion over whether the girl existed gives way to the narrators contemplating his own characteristic of pursuing an ideal perpetually. The ‘girl’ he pursued throughout the metaphysical forest turned out to be either distinctly different than his mental perception -- or otherwise, not existing at all. More neutral than “A Person Isn’t Safe Anywhere These Days,” “A Forest” elects to demonstrate the futility of idealization by having him tragically realize that his romantic pursuit derived more from fantasy than realistic expectations of women. Gothic literature continuously idealizes women as beautifully tragic -- too perfect to exist in a world fraught with death or undesirable traits. Here, The Cure corrects the idealization of women by acknowledging feminine perception as impossible. The manifested forest of his mind is the only ‘space’ which permits the existence of this girl, yet even there she eludes him; the ‘perfect woman’ is equally hard to conceptualize given its unrealistic properties.
