Fragile: An examination of the nurse as gothic trope and Its significance in today's turbulent world of health care

In popular culture, nurses are often represented as a liminal figure. In some ways, this reflects the reality of practice when nurses play a role in between health and wellness and when patients are hovering in states between life and death. In this dimension, modes of operating may be less concrete, more ambiguous and difficult to articulate. Horror narratives explore this state of inbetween-ness thoroughly, and this paper suggests that there is something to be learned about nurses in horror stories that helps to understand the enduring allure of nursing as a subject. The 2005 horror film, Fragile contains numerous gothic tropes, including the hospital as inhospitable and unsafe, and the nurse as monstrous or angelic, which taps into deep-seating cultural anxieties about health-care. That is, more than just entertainment, stories of nurses as ghosts, ghouls, or sublime angels mirror a concern that society has about the trustworthiness, or otherwise, of nurses and medicine. Gothic stories set in asylums typically capitalise on the larger-than-life architectural features to conjure an anxious aesthetic, and in this film another function is apparent. The impending demolition of the historical monolith to make way for modernity is riven with suspicion. The film also plays with the notion that nursing embodies an intersection between rational logic and intuitive knowing. Contemporary Gothic theory provides an interpretive lens through which nursing’s function in horror narratives can be explored.