Most Gothic connoisseurs know that the helpless heroine was at one point a dominant trope within Gothic literature. The genre’s first recognized work – The Castle of Otranto – featured a princess, Isabella, pitted against her conniving and wicked soon-to-be father-in-law, Manfred. Without the help of friar Jerome and a noble-hearted peasant, Theodore, she would never have made it out from under Manfred’s clutches.
In Wuthering Heights, Heathcliff imprisons and controls both Isabella Linton and Catherine Linton [Cathy #2]. In Dracula, the titular villain sets his sights on Mina Murray, who must rely upon the valiant efforts of four young Englishmen to save her. In The Turn of the Screw, the unnamed governess is surrounded by ghosts and wicked children, her understanding of these things shrouded by secrecy. She can do nothing to save the children from what has already claimed them.
But what about in contemporary Gothic writing?
It might be easy to assume that the helpless heroine is gone or that when she appears in a Gothic-seeming work like Twilight, she is no longer accepted or enjoyed by modern readers. But the truth is that she is alive and well. She makes an appearance in many modern Gothic works, but in a fresh and different way than she did in the past.
[I dealt with this subject in a slightly different way in the following post: Helpless Female Characters Readers Love. In that post I focused on the helpless heroine in general. In this post I focus on her appearance in modern writing and the specific ways that she responds to her helplessness.]
The helpless heroine trope is utilized very strongly in the following three works, in very different ways: The Queen of the Damned (1988) by Anne Rice, The Little Stranger (2009) by Sarah Waters and Mexican Gothic (2020) by Silvia Moreno-Garcia. Each of these is an excellent example of how to write the modern helpless heroine.
The Intrepid Seeker
Our first example is Jesse Reeves from The Queen of the Damned by Anne Rice. Jesse questions things. Everything. She’s constantly seeking the hidden truths around her. Thus it isn’t long before she uncovers the fact that she’s surrounded by vampires. This magnifies the tension in the story because readers suspect the truth long before Jesse knows it. And of course, readers know that Jesse is helpless against these undead beings.
That doesn’t stop Jesse though. Even after she knows what she’s facing, she continues moving into danger…because she has to uncover the truth at any cost. Jesse isn’t foolishly choosing a new course of action that will lead her into danger. Rather, she’s following up on the research that she had committed to complete for the Talamasca. Readers relate to this because she’s willing to continue on in what she’s doing without waiting for someone to bail her out of danger.
Instead of seeing her as foolhardy, this behavior gives readers a view into Jesse’s diligence and faithfulness. She doesn’t flinch from doing the hard [and dangerous] work that she said she would do. And yes, she will need some form of strength or aid outside of herself. As a human, she is unable to battle legions of vampires. In that way, Jesse is more like a traditionally helpless heroine. However, she doesn’t stand by waiting for that aid before acting.
This is a great example of a helpless heroine who presses aside her own fear, despite the danger, and continues working at what she is determined to accomplish.
The Quiet Pillar of Strength
Caroline Ayres in The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters is an example of a more classic helpless heroine…but with a surprising twist. If you’ve never read this book, Waters’ Gothic tale is one of the most classic-feeling works in the modern Gothic genre that I’ve ever encountered. I covered this book in a recent post about the uncanny, a subject which she very deftly and subtly explores in this novel. You can find it here.
At the onset of the story, Dr. Faraday comes to Hundreds Hall, an English estate with which he was acquainted as a child. He uses the family’s circumstances to forge a friendship with Caroline, a young woman who seems to be nothing but gentle, well-bred gentility. As the story progresses, readers feel a rising anxiety for Caroline as her world unravels around her.
Her beloved dog, a mild-mannered Labrador, bites a young girl and must be put down. Her brother is assailed by strange happenings and is accused of being insane. Her mother grows weaker and ill due to the strange happenings around them and the financial difficulties they face.
One of Waters’ most brilliant abilities is that of imbuing a character with a trait without ever voicing it or even explicitly demonstrating that it exists. Readers know that something is awry in Dr. Faraday’s intentions. We know that he’s greedy and grasping even though she never tells us and his actions are quite subtle. We see Caroline quietly playing into his hands, accepting his unromantic and ill-timed offer of marriage. We assume that she is oblivious to his true nature. And we see how helpless she is in the face of her desperate circumstances.
But she isn’t oblivious. And she has one weapon left in her arsenal. It’s a subtle one. A quiet one. Caroline doesn’t fire back at the doctor with any amount of aggression. Instead, she simply thwarts what he intends to gain. He has to go through her in order to have all of the wealth and social-standing that would come from being the master of Hundreds Hall. So she closes the door, figuratively. [I’ll let you read it and discover exactly what she does. It isn’t really the point of the book. This isn’t a mystery to be solved, or a thriller to be evaded, but I still won’t give it away.]
I’d call this type of helpless heroine the one who allows the hardships to happen to her until the very end when she calmly locks the door. She does both of these things at a loss to herself, which is why she waits until the end to pull out the only card she is able to play. However, she does have a card up her sleeve. This is a form of helplessness that gives the heroine one sacrificial way out of danger.
The Defiant Debutante
Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia features a young debutante, Noemí Taboada, who receives a letter from her cousin that she’s being held as a prisoner in her husband’s family home. Of course Noemí goes to the house high in the Mexican hill country to investigate. Because she’s headstrong and defiant.
Once there, she discovers that her cousin was telling the truth and that now they’re both prisoners. But unlike her cousin, Noemí is strong. Her circumstances render her helpless, but her character doesn’t. She’s going to probe the house and her brother-in-law’s family history until she understands what’s happening there. And then she’s going to oppose it. With or without any help from anyone.
This is a shade different from Jesse Reeves in The Queen of the Damned. Jesse is also committed to uncovering the truth and she is fearless, but she isn’t going to wage war against any vampires on her own. For Jesse, the truth is the end goal. For Noemí, vanquishing the enemy is the end goal.
Noemí is the kind of helpless heroine who’s a fighter regardless of whether she has any power or tools with which she can defeat the antagonist. She doesn’t have the strength to win on her own – she is helpless – but she keeps on trying, pushing against the boundaries of her adversary.
Conclusion
The one thing that each of these women does is act. That’s something that we covered in my prior post about powerless female characters [powerless to change their circumstances]. But hopefully these three specific examples give you some inspiration about how to craft relatable helpless heroines.
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