Throughout this book I have considered the Gothic through the lens of the maternal gaze to offer new possibilities for both the genre’s critical direction and gaze theory. While there is a strong heritage of writing about mothers in the Female Gothic, seeing the Gothic mother as a tyrant who exerts her control over the domestic space through incarceration and surveillance via her filicidal gaze challenges the Gothic archetype of the paternal tyrant and affords the mother a more active position than previous spectral or victim readings allowed her. Understanding her tyranny as executed through a maternal gaze issued from the womb also redresses the imbalance of gaze theory which privileges the phallus, where the male gaze is perceived as the active, fetishising one and the female as passive and lacking or mediated by that of the male.