Charlotte Lesemann

Something that many people will cite when describing Gothic writing is the prevalence of exaggerated emotions. Some people even go so far as to assume that the definition of Gothic writing is simply hysteria mixed with a dark ambience and perhaps some supernatural elements. Jane Austen was guilty of this. If you’ve read much of my blog, or watched my videos, you know that this is something that annoys me greatly. Gothic writing is so much more than these superficial components.

But that’s not to say that Gothic writing doesn’t often feature intense emotional responses. Why is that?

That’s what we’re talking about today.

Think about emotions for a second. Until you see someone’s emotional response, how much do you understand about what’s going on in their life? In their mind? Their heart? Not much. You might pick up some clues from what they say or do, but without that emotional element, it’s a lot harder to read them.

Emotions reveal those things that are often hidden inside of a person.

They take what’s unseen and they make it manifest. They take the simmering rage, or the uncontrollable passion, or the fathomless despair and they present them to the world. Otherwise, we might not understand the full extent of those emotions.

If you’re thinking about your reading repertoire, you’ve likely noted that hyperbolic emotions aren’t present in much of literature. They make an appearance in a heightened situation – a domestic dispute, a shattering loss, an exhilarating win – but otherwise, infrequently. Why? Because in reality, people don’t show the full extent of their emotions most of the time. They lie dormant, concealed behind subtext and those quotidien activities that make up the bulk of the human experience.

That brings us back to the Gothic and why, in contrast, they make such a strong showing in this genre. I can think of at least two very strong reasons for the use of intense emotions in Gothic writing. Both of them are tied to the nature of Gothic themes.

Making the Unseen Tangible

If you recall an article that I wrote a while back – How Gothic Writing Makes the B-Plot Tangible – I talked about ways in which Gothic tropes take the underlying thematic story and make it tangible. For instance, in Gothic writing, ghosts are never just a ghost. They’re an unresolved part of the protagonist’s past, or a part of herself that she’s repressed or refuses to face, or a reminder of someone she wronged, or…

The stormy weather is a symbol of the brewing tension in the household, or the dark mental state of the character(s), or the undercurrent of evil intentions within the antagonist, or…you get the point. The tropes mean something.

They take what is unseen and make it accessible.

The same is true of the preponderance of emotions in Gothic writing. Of course, with emotions, they’re less likely to be symbolic rather than simply an expression of the character’s true state. But they, like the gothic tropes, are making the unseen manifest.

This was the case in The Exorcist by William Peter Blatty. One of the most unseen themes we could possibly explore is the existence of evil entities – the sort that can takeover a human and control her, rendering her helpless. But that’s what Blatty did. And the emotions in the book and movie parallel this exploration. They give voice to the horror of what’s happening within.

Exaggerating an Irrational Theme

Other times, writers use the excessive emotions to exaggerate that Gothic (aka: irrational) theme. When dealing with themes that can’t be explained through ordinary, empirical means, emotions can come in particularly handy

Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë is a wonderful example of this. When I think about excessive emotions in Gothic writing, Catherine Earnshaw is the first character who comes to mind. And Heathcliff is generally the second. The two of them are a study in excesses.

We’ll get into this in a book review in the near future, but suffice it to say that yes, this book is a love story… but not the one that Hollywood portrays. The key is to watch Nellie’s character – what she says and does – for the writer’s perspective and the book’s theme.

The story deals with a relationship that’s taken to excesses, to the point of idolatry. Heathcliff loves Catherine so much that he allows it to take over him and destroy him. He becomes a monster in the midst of his obsession with her. He refuses to live without her. And she possesses a histrionic character that sees all things in an unhealthy light. She’s vicious, vindictive, greedy and possessive. She must have all of Heathcliff’s attention. But she also must have money and esteem from marrying Edgar Linton.

Their excessive emotional states from start to finish parallel the theme that Brontë is exploring: about love taken to an unhealthy point. About two youths and then adults who are so excessive that they destroy one another and almost everyone else around them.

Conclusion

These intense emotions work hand-in-hand with Gothic themes, themes that are often particularly intangible. They make them seen and also exaggerate them to make the writer’s point easier for readers to grasp.

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And How to Accomplish That

Have you ever read a book, or watched a movie, and noticed that you felt consistently off throughout the story? As if you couldn’t get your bearings, couldn’t find a way to predict what’s coming next, or found the character(s) to be delightfully unrelatable? And yet you truly enjoyed the experience. [It sounds like an oxymoron – I know – but stay with me.]

There’s a reason why what sense of imbalance is useful in some stories. That’s what we’re talking about today. Why and when you would want that sense of unease, and how to create it.

In the movie world, I can think of lots of examples of this. In parts of The Matrix and much of Memento, and Inception, viewers are thrown off-kilter. We aren’t sure what’s real and what isn’t. We aren’t even always sure where the character really is. (I’m talking about you Dominick Cobb.)

But this is just as prevalent in certain types of books. Let’s look at examples by category – depending on when and why you would want the reader to feel unsettled.

To Parallel Psychological Instability

First, when the main character’s psychological state is coming unhinged, it’s often most effective if the readers feel this as well. The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson is a great example of this. In the story, Eleanor Vance grows increasingly disoriented within the house – to such an extent that readers feel unstable and confused along with her. Jackson describes the house in such a way that the walls and doors seem to move.

The sense readers have parallels Eleanor’s mental instability. By making the story disorienting, readers have an opportunity to experience – to some extent – Eleanor’s inability to cope in the real world.

To Cause Readers to Consider a Controversial Theme

Second, when writers want readers to consider a theme that they might dismiss at first glance, one of the best ways to do so is to force the readers to step out of their element. By that I mean, cause them to feel disoriented so that they can’t predict what the character(s) will so. This end is often accomplished through the use of an unreliable narrator. We talked about this recently on the Gothic Literary Society YouTube channel, but I’ll summarize a couple of examples here.

The first is Shutter Island by Dennis Lehane. In the story, Teddy Daniels travels to an island to visit a prison for the criminally insane. As the story progresses, it becomes more and more obvious that Teddy’s perspective may not be accurate. This throws the reader off enough to make the theme – whether it’s better to live as a monster or to die as a good man – resonate. Years after reading the book and watching the movie, I still see that one, final scene in my mind. Whereas I might have disregarded it before, the nuances of both options are now forever warring in my mind.

The second is We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson. [Jackson was a master of this concept of leaving readers unsettled.] She uses an unreliable narrator – Merricat Blackwood – in an entirely different way from Dennis Lehane. Rather than a tragic character, Merricat is deliriously odd. She’s vindictive, witchy and borderline autistic in such a delightful way that readers love her. And by using such an unrelatable character, readers are thrown off balance enough to consider something they might not have: that the collective is the enemy of the individual.

To Cause a Paradigm Shift

Third, humans have a habit of developing paradigms – for obvious and practical purposes. Paradigms help us to predict and respond to the world around us. But sometimes paradigms are false…or only partially true. And we writers love to call these into question.

William Gibson’s novel The Neuromancer – the inspiration for the movie The Matrix – does just that, among other things. By creating characters who can enter into the matrix and experience a separate, virtual reality, the book questions reality itself. It’s not simply that either the virtual reality or the seen one is true. The question is whether what we see and believe around us is actually the truth, or at least, the full-extent of the truth. Or whether, perhaps, we’ve been conditioned to believe things that aren’t true.

By using what was at that time, a cutting-edge idea of technology and the relationship between it and humans, Gibson created a world in which readers have no precedential leg to stand on. Rather, we’re left imbalanced and because of that, more open-minded to the theme.

How Do We Accomplish That

From the examples above, I think you can see the advantages to this sense of unease. And some examples of how writers have accomplished this. But how do we go about it?

As a writer, we only have twenty-six letters to work with. With these we craft people, settings, stories and sometimes entire worlds. The key to creating this sense of disorientation in readers is to use these very things in ways that they don’t expect, or with which they are unfamiliar. In all of these, what you want to create is a sense of the uncanny – when things that we expect to be familiar aren’t. They look like what we know, but then they function in ways that we don’t anticipate. I’ll give you examples of each.

People – As with Merricat and Teddy Daniels, unease blooms in the case of an unreliable narrator. To create one, your character must perceive reality in a false way. Sometimes the character is a liar, openly or secretly concocting a false reality – perhaps for reasons with which readers will sympathize… perhaps not.

Sometimes the character is mentally unstable, misunderstanding reality because of a psychological problem or a neurological impairment.

And sometimes the character is just so strange that his words and actions are consistently unexpected. If the reader can enjoy the character and yet can’t predict what he or she will do, that will create this sense of disorientation. Of course, the character’s actions need to make sense for him and for the plot. But they need to be unpredictable for the reader.

Setting – Some settings are guaranteed to throw readers out of their comfort zone. And I’m not necessarily referring to a fantasy setting. Most of these mirror reality enough that readers feel at home in the new world. If your characters live on Mars, but they have some means of growing food and keeping house and laboring, readers will feel at home even in the most distant galaxy. This is a wonderful feeling for other purposes, but not for what we’re describing.

If you want your readers to be disoriented, what you want in a setting – real-world or fantasy – is to create a sense of the outlandish. A pig farm on which the pigs rise up, attack the farmer, eat him and his wife and then go out into the world to accomplish whatever goal they have for themselves. I’m being a bit absurd to illustrate a point. Readers think that a pig farm will function in a given way. They know something about how it should work. So when it doesn’t work that way, it throws off the readers sense of balance.

Exactly what you want.

Plot – The same is true with respect to plots. The best way to create imbalance in the reader is to give them a plot that they think they recognize and then turn it upside down.

Say you picked up a murder mystery in which the body of a young girl is found at the beginning of the book. Her parents and the investigators team up to solve the crime. You settle in with the book, ready to read about the trail of the murderer and the clues that he/she has left.

But then the parents begin to act strangely. They don’t seem that sad. And their efforts to track the murderer, efforts that appeared normal at first, take an interesting turn. Now it doesn’t really seem like they’re actually looking for a killer. But we’re not sure what they’re looking for.

And the investigators too. What at first seems like a normal murder investigation becomes something else altogether. The people they’re questioning, the trails their pursuing become more and more [seemingly] disjointed. Why? Because we’re assuming one thing – that they’re looking for the murderer when in reality, they’re doing something else entirely.

That method – of twisting the expectations of the reader – is a wonderful way to create a sense of unease.

Conclusion

There are many reasons why we might want readers to feel unsettled. Sometimes it’s the best way to cause them to consider a theme that’s so far outside of their experience that they might overlook or disregard it at first glance.

To accomplish this, use the notion of the uncanny in your writing. Use characters, settings, or plots that seem to function in familiar ways and then twist them just enough to set everything on edge.

Not only will this help you shift the reader’s paradigm or open her up to your theme. It’ll also make your story that much more interesting and unique.

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Last Friday, I posted a Horror/ Dark Fantasy video on Stephen King’s 2019 novel, The Institute. I’m also preparing another video based on my favorite work of Horror. (I can’t tell you which one yet 🙂 Look for it the last Friday of October.) Both novels feature child protagonists. Which prompted the question in my mind:

What are the reasons for, and advantages of, using children in the horror genre?

I’m referring to adult fiction, not young adult. Because even there, children often play a central role in the genre. But why is that? As I considered it, several compelling reasons stood out. Let’s look at three of them, and some examples of how these have played out in the pages of horror literature!

Children Represent Our Deepest Vulnerability

Using children as protagonists won’t appeal to everyone, but a child protagonist is so much more than just a young character. He’s a proxy for the vulnerability of adults. And judging by the popularity of these characters, many readers sense this at some level.

Unless you’ve lived a magical, glitter-infused existence, you probably know that though we may try are hardest, our efforts may still not pay off. We can exercise regularly, eat only organic produce and still face a horrifying diagnosis at an early age. We can drive carefully, buckle our seat belts and still be blind-sided by a semi.

I apologize if that’s depressing, but I write it in order to illustrate something most people understand: how little control, if any, we have over our lives.

The loss, or absence of control is the source of ulcers, panic attacks and nightmares for many. Making it a great basis for the Horror genre in which we want to highlight and address those kinds of themes – the ones that make us uncomfortable and which we can so easily avoid avoid.

Children often represent the weakest individuals in humanity. They are largely dependent on others and are physically, emotionally and psychologically undeveloped. They represent the part of ourselves that feels the most vulnerable, susceptible to forces and circumstances against which we have no control.

Who does the demon attack in The Exorcist by William Peter Blatty? Eleven-year-old Regan MacNeil. Why her? Because the story isn’t about her. It’s about her atheistic mother and the priest, Father Damien Karras, whose faith is faltering. They’re the ones who need to learn that the spiritual world is real and that it’s not to be trifled with. Regan is simply a symbol of weakness against those unseen powers, a warning to those who don’t know how weak they actually are.

Children Intensify the Consequences of Adults’ Actions

If you’ve watched my videos, you may have heard me mention Save the Cat! Writes a Novel by Jessica Brody. In her writing craft book, she mentions that the horror genre should always include a secret sin, meaning some unresolved failing in one of the character’s lives. That character can also be a larger entity – a government or military, or even a global organization. It’s that secret sin that symbolically manifests as the opposition to the main character.

In the case of child characters, it’s rarely the child who’s the source of that secret sin. Rather, it’s the child or children who often have to face the consequences of the secret sin of adults. And that’s crucial, because using a child character exaggerates the severity of our failings as adults. It’s one thing to see how a adult is harmed by another adult’s actions. But it’s another to see the lives of the most innocent in society experience the horrifying fall-out of the terrible choices that adults sometimes make.

Swan Song by Robert McCammon is a great example of this. The titular character, Swan, is a bewitching young girl, gifted with the ability to bring about growth in the earth. In the beginning of the story, she is a tragic character, focusing on her beautiful tiny garden alongside the trailer where she lives, while her mother and her mother’s boyfriend abusive relationship rages in the background.

But before long, the world collapses under nuclear war and she is caught in a struggle to survive amidst greed, famine and environmental hardship. Of course, she is the one able to help the world heal and recover, but it’s not without great trials that she didn’t earn or deserve. And her helplessness highlights the consequences of the terrible actions of the world’s most powerful entities.

Children Give Us the Most Hope

Lastly, working with child-characters can give readers the most hope. It seems odd to say that pitting a child-character against seemingly insurmountable foes can do this. But, when the child prevails, it does. What that victory says to readers is that no matter how powerless we may feel – and actually be at times – it is possible to face horrible odds and to succeed.

Despite the popularity of Marvel movies, it isn’t as spectacular when a superhero hits a home run as when the little near-sighted, dyslexic boy next door faces the same odds and comes out ahead. Then our hearts soar. Because that speaks to us the most closely. We aren’t gods. We’re fallible, mortal, vulnerable. But we need hope. We need to know that there’s a chance for those who don’t have any superpowers.

If you’ve ever read Summer of Night by Dan Simmons, you know what it is to see true horror manifest in the lives of five twelve-year-old boys. One of these is exceptionally intelligent, but the others are merely a well-rounded mix of relatively normal kids. None have any supernatural abilities. And yet they prevail. They go to war against something that seems too great for even adults to vanquish and come out ahead. It’s a beautifully nostalgic book within a pervasively horrifying tome of suspended tension. Simmons’s writing is brilliant.

And the children’s victory makes it doubly poignant.

Conclusion

There are plenty of books with adult protagonists that I count among my all time favorites. But some of my all-time favorites feature child protagonists. And now I can see why these sometimes impact me the most strongly. Because they speak to our greatest weakness while simultaneously holding out the most rewarding victory.

If you love them as well, don’t be afraid to use young characters in your adult fiction. Those characters might just be the ones that convey your theme the most clearly.

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Beware! Plot Spoilers Ahead!

My first experience with Gothic literature was Rebecca, by Daphne du Maurier. The story touched me in such a deep way that I fell in love with the Gothic genre from that point on. The novel was published in 1938. Since then, Hollywood has made two movies based on it: the 1940 film by Alfred Hitchcock and the 2020 remake by Ben Wheatley. Clearly, the story is a fantastic one – full of intrigue, psychological depth and relational complexity, set against a fascinating backdrop: the historical estate of the de Winter family on the coast of England.

On the surface, the story is about a young woman who meets a widower in Monte Carlo. She falls in love with him, marries him, and then moves back to his estate, Manderley. Once she gets there though, she learns that his first wife, Rebecca, was a woman of great beauty, intelligence and skill. Throughout the book, she feels the growing weight of the comparison between herself and Rebecca and what she believes her husband, Maxim, thinks of her in contrast to his perfect first wife. This comparison grows to a paralyzing point until she learns something cataclysmic that changes everything.

This main character, the second Mrs. de Winter, is never named for at least two possible reasons. The first is that we as readers are meant to see ourselves in du Maurier presentation of her. The second is that the protagonist’s self-perception is only in relation to her status as either the companion to Mrs. Van Hopper (at the beginning of the book), or subsequently, as the wife of Maxim de Winter and/or the successor of his first wife, Rebecca.

The Antagonist(s)

What the protagonist wants most is for her husband to love her as she loves him, and to reconcile herself to the idol that she sees in his former wife.

However, there are two principle antagonists in this book who are preventing her this. Both are reflections of the main character’s beliefs about who Rebecca was. The first is an external one: Mrs. Danvers. As Rebecca’s former personal maid, Mrs. Danvers is fiercely loyal to the memory of her mistress. As such, throughout the book, she constantly reiterates and reinforces the protagonist’s opinion that she is inferior to Rebecca.

While Mrs. Danvers plays an antagonistic role, the principle antagonist is actually the second antagonist: the main character’s own imagination, her comparison of herself with Rebecca, and her resulting sense of inferiority.

What is the Theme?

In this work, du Maurier is exploring the idea that comparing ourselves to someone else is paralyzing, and that, in the process, we often reach false conclusions. I love that du Maurier uses a deceased character whom the main character had never met in order to demonstrate this theme. All the new Mrs. de Winter knows of Rebecca is what other people tell her. As the book progresses, readers sense that these perspectives are very one-sided.

For example, many of the characters who tell the protagonist something about Rebecca only knew Rebecca’s public face. They didn’t really know the full person. In contrast, there are some characters like Frank Crawley, the manager/ agent of the estate, who chooses his words very carefully. If you read beneath the surface, it’s clear that Frank did know who Rebecca really was, but he doesn’t want to say anything against her out of his loyalty to Maxim. And also because Frank knows more about Rebecca’s fate than he lets on.

For example, right around the one-third point in the book, Mrs. de Winter comes home from a trip to visit the Bishop’s wife. She sees Frank walking along the drive and gets out of the car to walk with him. When she tells him about her day, Frank makes a very general comment in response and the protagonist rightly assesses that “It was the sort of remark Frank Crawley always made. Safe, conventional, very correct.”

So, she clearly understands that he is very politically careful not to say anything objectionable. Then she begins to prod him with comments about Rebecca’s skill in organizing large balls and parties at the estate. Instead of praising Rebecca, Frank says, “We all of us worked pretty hard.”

Now, given that she’s just identified that Frank is one to only say what’s safe, she should have begun to suspect that his comment actually conceals a very different truth. Instead, she says that, at that point, she began to wonder if Frank had been in love with Rebecca.

That’s a perfect illustration of what du Maurier does with the theme throughout the book. She makes a true statement and then causes the protagonist to misinterpret it so that the theme is exaggerated. This allows the protagonist to build up a false view of Rebecca in her mind: that everyone else must have loved and admired her.

Gothic Tropes

To work with this theme and make it clear, du Maurier uses at least four tropes: fog, an old estate, isolation, and family secrets.

Fog

At the three-quarters point in the book, after the fateful costume party, the protagonist’s false reality – her incorrect conclusions about who Rebecca really was – are at a fever pitch. Simultaneously, a ship runs aground off of the coast of Manderley. When the divers go down to investigate the wreckage, they discover Rebecca’s sunken sailboat with her body in it. Now everyone knows that what they had believed about Rebecca’s death is false. But this discovery also challenges all of the protagonist’s prior assumptions about who Rebecca was as a person. At this point, she’s left with nothing but confusion.

Not surprisingly, du Maurier lays a heavy fog over this entire scene. At the point when the fog rolls in, our protagonist knows that something about her assumptions is wrong and that she can no longer hold on to her false beliefs. But she still doesn’t know the truth. The fog mirrors her confusion. She can’t see through it. She can’t understand what is or isn’t the truth.

Old Estate (Manderley)

The de Winter estate is a large, old home resembling a castle. I mentioned earlier that it mirrors the internal antagonist: the protagonist’s false reality. It’s clear from the point at which Mrs. de Winter first arrives at Manderley that she is uncomfortable there. She feels awkward, out of place, and ill-equipped to manage the estate. At the very beginning, she gets lost and can’t find her way back to the main rooms she knows. She also responds to a phone call by saying that Mrs. de Winter isn’t alive, illustrating the fact that she doesn’t see herself as the true Mrs. de Winter.

Later on, she breaks a little statue that represents, on a micro-scale, the house itself. Instead of owning the accident as her own, she tries to hide it. Why? Because she doesn’t see herself as the mistress of the house. The house and its contents stand apart from her as something that she believes are better than herself. These events exemplify her inability to find her place in the household.

And throughout the book, she is afraid of Rebecca’s former suite of rooms. Even when she finally ventures in, the bedroom is a place of terror and another source of her false reality. Because she sees the room as one of perfect beauty, she sees in it a confirmation of her incorrect belief: that Rebecca was perfect and that she is inferior to her.

In all of these incidents, du Maurier uses the house to parallel the protagonist’s psychological state. In her responses to the house, we see her inferiority complex more clearly.

Isolation

After Maxim and Mrs. de Winter return to Manderley from their honeymoon tour, our protagonist is often alone. It is implied that, since he’s been away, Maxim has business to attend to, business that takes him to London for overnight trips. In reality though, with an estate manager/ agent, Frank Crawley, on site, Maxim should have had more time for his new bride. Instead readers witness incidents such as when, on one occasion, the protagonist comes to breakfast and the men immediately get up and leave, having already eaten. On this occasion, it’s clear that they could have lingered long enough to keep her company.

This is not an accident. Du Maurier did this in order to support the theme. The main character’s problem is one within her own head. It is her isolation from the reality of Maxim’s history and the truth that enables her to generate her incorrect conclusions about Rebecca. Thus, her physical isolation from Maxim – the source of the truth – is an important means of exaggerating and demonstrating that.

Family Secrets

Lastly, what about the family secrets? I’ve already hinted at it. Rebecca was not the woman who the protagonist assumed her to be. And Maxim’s relationship with Rebecca was something entirely different as well.

[I’m trying not to give away everything!]

But the truth about these things had to be a secret. Not just because this is a mystery, but because the theme wouldn’t have worked if the protagonist had known the truth.

If, early in the book, Maxim had confessed to her even part of the truth, she wouldn’t have created the false reality in her mind. She wouldn’t have decided that Rebecca was a perfect woman whom he loved and to whom he constantly compared his new wife. She would have known that that was at least partly false.

By keeping the main character in the dark, by establishing the family secrets, the author is able to work with the theme and show readers how terribly destructive it is to build up a false reality in our heads. One to which no one can measure up, least of all ourselves.

Can you see how these tropes help with the theme? That’s the key in the Gothic genre. It’s not the fog or the secrets that make the book Gothic. These elements are there to support a Gothic theme. It’s the Gothic theme that makes the book Gothic.

Is the Book Gothic?

I think you know the answer to this already, but let’s summarize. First the theme: is it a Gothic one? Well, it deals with something that can’t be reasoned or proved empirically: the idea that we create entire expectations and assumptions in our heads, based on false understandings. The idea that these false conclusions can be paralyzing and can produce a constant state of debilitating terror in our lives is a psychological one. It’s definitely Gothic. In Rebecca, du Maurier takes a psychological – you might even argue spiritual – state and makes it tangible. She brings it to life in the character of Mrs. Danvers, in the character of the house, Manderley, and in the protagonist’s responses to these.

And as we just discussed, all of the Gothic tropes that she uses exist to prove and support this Gothic theme. That’s the essence of Gothic right there.

So yes, I believe that this book is quintessentially Gothic. And I hope you’ll read (or re-read) it and enjoy it as much as I do!

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When most people talk about Gothic writing, they mention books such as Wuthering Heights, Jane Eyre or Dracula. Or even the poems and stories of Edgar Allan Poe. A few people will mention more contemporary Gothic writing such as Anne Rice’s Vampire Chronicles. But it seems like few people have any modern references despite the fact that there are many.

But how do these modern works differ from their historical predecessors? That’s what we’re talking about today – the evolution of Gothic writing!

This is a huge topic, one we can only cover at a minimum, but let’s take a look at as many examples as we can. And keep in mind that I’m including all of the works that are termed Gothic, many of which do not have truly Gothic themes and which I would not call Gothic. In addition, I’m going to consider works that aren’t marketed as Gothic…but should be.

I’m doing that for a reason. Including all of these works demonstrates the progression of what writers and readers believe about the Gothic genre. So stay with me.

To start with though, there are at least two things that have not changed since the Gothic genre began with the Castle Otranto, by Horace Walpole. And these are opposing elements. The first is the tendency of some writers to assume that Gothic writing is predominantly sensational superficiality and to focus on that. The second is the contrasting trend in which writers use the Gothic genre, especially its tropes to explore heavy themes related to spirituality, psychology and the progression of modern events.

Sensational Superficiality

If there was an award for the most sensational and nonsensical Gothic novel, the first Gothic work of all time – the Castle Otranto by Horace Walpole – would certainly be in the running. The book is so awkward that it’s hard to even argue that it’s Gothic, though I believe that it is. In order to find its Gothic underpinnings, we have to wade through the absurd. The plight of Princess Isabella at the hands of her soon-to-be father-in-law has real promise, but the remainder of the book takes this threat and explores it through comical events such as giant helmets falling from the sky.

Another example would be Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen. While it’s less absurd than Otranto, it’s clear that Austen’s disdain for the Gothic genre stemmed from her misunderstanding of it. She wrote this book intending to write in the Gothic, while also satirizing the genre. But the result is not Gothic. She overlays a very Austenian theme – one of family and culture in late eighteenth and early nineteenth century England – with superficial Gothic elements. The Gothic components serve to mock those who make superstitious and illogical assumptions based on an overuse of their imagination. That may be a common misconception of the Gothic genre – that it’s nothing more than overblown emotional responses – but it’s certainly not true. And it misinterprets the reasons for the genre’s use of hyperbolic emotion.

While the style and method has changed over the years, this obsession with the superficial elements of the Gothic genre is still present in our modern era.

Case in point: Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia. Her book, strongly implied to be, and marketed as, Gothic, is anything but. It has a haunted house, a fair amount of family secrets, and a hidden life force waiting to subsume the unwitting protagonist, Noemi Taboada. But the theme? The entire book hinges on the family’s obsession with preserving its genetic bloodlines. That’s a theme based on a secret sin, which is the underpinnings of the horror genre, not the Gothic one.

Keep in mind, I’m not saying that any of these books, or other examples like them – awkward Otranto notwithstanding – are bad. They’re just not Gothic. The authors have focused their Gothic intent on the superficial tropes, not understanding (or not caring for, I’m not sure which) the underlying purpose of Gothic literature: it’s irrational themes.

A Manifestation of the B-Plot

On the other hand, there are numerous examples of Gothic writing – in prior centuries or our current one – in which authors have used the Gothic tropes to highlight and elucidate Gothic themes. I wrote an article on this awhile back, in which I explained how Gothic enables this sort of exploration. You can find it here.

Frankenstein by Mary Shelley is a good example. Shelley used her reincarnated monster to examine her contemporaries’ focus on science to an extent that concerned her. In the book, she explored the idea that science can give man the opportunity to play God to an extent that could be horribly destructive. The monster, the tangible result of just such a scenario, is an outward manifestation of the dangers associated with this practice.

Or the Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde. In the book, Dorian commissions a self-portrait. As the book progresses, Dorian, an exceptionally handsome, upper-class young man sets off down a self-destructive path. Though Wilde handles the matter with a superb balance of subtlety and disclosure, it’s evident that Dorian is engaging in every form of immorality he can find. As his soul becomes more and more polluted, his portrait grows increasingly corrupted and hideous. In person though, he looks as polished and unchanged as before. The seemingly-possessed portrait is the Gothic trope Wilde uses to make the internal state of Gray’s soul tangible to the reader. The contrast between the two provides us with Wilde’s theme.

A more contemporary example of this is a book that’s not marketed as Gothic, but which explores a very Gothic theme. That would be Carrion Comfort by Dan Simmons. He uses characters whom he terms mind vampires to explore the idea of people who use others for their own gain, whatever form that might take. Using World War II, an era in which so many Nazi soldiers were willing to destroy millions of fellow humans, as his backdrop, he sets off on a journey that explores the idea of this concept at a global level. It’s brilliant. And it’s Gothic Horror.

All that to say that both the prevalence of a superficial and sensational use of Gothic tropes and a deep use of these tropes in conjunction with Gothic themes are evident from 1764 through the modern era.

So what has changed?

An Increase in Sensationalism

It probably won’t surprise you that, for those who see the Gothic genre as nothing but a sensational, superficial use of Gothic tropes, that sensationalism has increased in modern times. Mexican Gothic is a perfect example of this. The book, which is well-written overall, takes its darker elements to extremes.

This trend is even easier to spot in Gothic-branded television series, such as Hannibal, True Blood, American Gothic, The Haunting of Hill House and Penny Dreadful. I’m constantly looking for good Gothic writing – in literature or in screenplays – and am, more often than not, confronted with nothing more than a presentation of darkness. It seems like many of these writers assume that the more evil or taboo the subject, the darker the psychological state and ambience of the work, the more Gothic it is. However, cannibalism, incest, and blood sacrifices don’t necessarily have anything to do with the Gothic genre. But of course, there’s a market for this, Gothic or not.

Modern Events = Modern Themes

If we look at some of the modern works that are more consistent with the irrational Gothic themes that established the genre, the trend is to use these themes to address more contemporary issues. Earlier, I mentioned Carrion Comfort, by Dan Simmons. His theme – that certain people have a sociopathic desire to subsume the wills of others to their own – is certainly not a modern idea. But his use of WWII and the lingering questions that came out of that war, makes the theme particularly relevant and modern.

The same is true of Salem’s Lot by Stephen King. In the book, King addresses the theme that those who are willing to admit that evil is real are the only people who are prepared and able to fight it. Ignorance is not bliss. At first blush, this doesn’t sound modern, but it is. Throughout history, people have embraced an understanding of the supernatural and the occurrence of things that we can neither see nor control. Spiritual entities that act independent of mankind. But in more recent generations, the prevalence of atheism and agnosticism has made such a belief one of scorn and derision. In that respect, this book is actually something of a rebuttal against such a temporal focus.

Of course, this is less of a change, than a return to the traditional use of the Gothic genre. Mary Shelley did much the same in using the Gothic genre to call contemporary beliefs and practices to account. The only real change today is that the events and beliefs are unique to our era. But in many of these cases, the audience, the industry and perhaps even the writers themselves, by mislabeling these works, imply that they don’t understand what constitutes a truly Gothic novel.

Gothic Confusion

In summary, what I see is primarily an increase in confusion. Writers – literary or cinematic – are increasingly using Gothic tropes with no underlying Gothic theme and yet labeling the work as Gothic. That seems to be driving the increase in sensationalism. But it also explains the mislabeling of works that do explore Gothic themes and which are usually labeled as Horror.

All of this leaves the market of readers confused. What is Gothic and what isn’t?

Which, of course, is why I wanted to start this blog and my corresponding YouTube channel – The Gothic Literary Society. I love Gothic writing – the true Gothic stuff of Shelley and Jackson and Rice. I want to see it continue. And for that to happen, readers and writers need to know how to differentiate Gothic from sensationalism. And we need to go out and use Gothic tropes in such a way that they make deep Gothic themes come to life. Themes that cause people to think about irrational concepts that are hard to address in any other genre.

Help me end the confusion. Tell people about the rich complexity of the Gothic genre. And even better, go write a wonderful Gothic book! And let me know so I can tell everyone about it!

“Some day you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again.” C.S. Lewis

Recently, I released a video on Red Riding Hood, in which I talked about the Brothers Grimm story Little Red Cap and the 2011 movie, Red Riding Hood, by Catherine Hardwicke. We dug into the theme and the tropes used and examined why that story is a Gothic one. If you’d like to watch it, you can find it here.

For this post I thought we’d do something similar, but different, and take a look at some of the Gothic tendencies that we see in fairy tales.

Because who doesn’t love fairy tales?

Disclaimer

You’re going to want to set aside all of your Disney references, if you have them, because Disney often strips the stories of their original meaning and white-washes them with a vacuous, Americanized ending. If you’re looking for an example of this, compare the original Hans Christian Andersen version of The Little Mermaid with the Disney version. In the Disney one, Ariel makes a deal with the sea witch, gets to land, eventually wins over the prince (with a few close calls of course) and then lives happily ever after. Lesson: make a deal with a witch and get what you want.

In the original, Ariel makes a deal with the sea witch in return for time on land. And it’s not just to win the prince. What Ariel wants most is an eternal soul (unlike the temporal soul of a mermaid). However, Ariel doesn’t win over the prince and he marries another woman. The witch then offers her sisters another deal – if Ariel kills the prince, she can return to her family in the sea. Otherwise she has to die and become the foam on the surface of the waves. Ariel debates and then decides to sacrifice herself rather than hurting the man she loves. She falls into the sea and dies…But, because of her selflessness, she is turned into a spirit who will one day ascend to heaven. Lesson: self-sacrifice is a model of true love and selflessness is truly rewarded.

I think you can see how the original, with its beautiful and heart-rending ending, is a million times more thought-provoking and is an emotionally evocative picture of love.

All that to say, I’ll be discussing some of the older versions of these fairy tales, so put aside your Disney versions for the duration of this post, or you might be confused.

Examples of Gothic Fairy Tales

It might surprise you to consider some fairy tales as Gothic. And if you google it, most writers do nothing more than ascribe the title “gothic” to the darker elements in some of the Brothers Grimm tales. But there are some Gothic fairy tales, and they do much to speak to those weighty truths that lie beneath the surface.

For instance, in the video on Red Riding Hood, we examined the theme that wolves – people who want to take advantage of others – are everywhere; that they prey on old and young alike; that they often look like those around us – neighbors, friends, family; and that they often use well-meaning or sincere-sounding words to trap us.

How about Bluebeard? In the original French tale by Charles Perrault, a young woman is ensnared by an odd-looking man with a blue beard. At first, she and her sister refuse to entertain his advances, partly because he’s so unattractive, but mostly because he had been married several times and his wives had disappeared without a trace. Bluebeard finally wins over the younger sister by inviting the entire family out to his country estate where he entertains them with fine feasts, hunting excursions and extravagant balls. But after she marries him, she soon discovers what happened to his former wives: Bluebeard chained them to the wall in one of the rooms of his castle and slit their throats. In the end, she is narrowly rescued by her brothers and then ultimately finds a “worthy” man to marry. The obvious lesson here is that character is more important than wealth and to be blinded by money is to make oneself a potential victim.

So why is this Gothic? The story points to the ways in which superficial things – in this case money – can so easily blind us to the truth of who someone is. This is a spiritual theme. It’s something almost everyone can agree is true, and yet why is it the case? The sister knew his wives were missing. The red flags were there. And yet she still couldn’t see past his opulent lifestyle. That’s something we can’t reason our way around. It’s an irrational theme.

You might argue that Hansel and Gretel is also Gothic. It’s a tale about a time of famine and is said to originate in the medieval time period, particularly during the European Famine of 1314 – 1322. The father and stepmother of two children choose to abandon them in the forest in order to have more food for themselves. That’s not the end of the children though. Hansel and Gretel stumble upon a witch’s cottage that is elaborately decorated in candy and other desserts. There they are ensnared by the woman who intends to keep them and feed them well so that they’ll be fatter before she cooks them and eats them. Of course, they outsmart her, kill her instead and escape. Once they make their way home, they find that their stepmother – the source of the plan to abandon the children – has died and their father is overjoyed to see them.

If you read into the story carefully (in any number of versions), it’s easy to come away with the understanding that the witch in the woods is a proxy for the stepmother. And that the children had to kill her in self-defense. She is the proverbial witch.

Why might this be Gothic? Leaving aside the superficial – the tropes of abandonment, cannibalism and the like – the theme deals with the stepmother’s inability to put the care of the children above her own preservation. I don’t think it’s an accident that the original storytellers cast her as the stepmother. Not that stepmothers are always like this, but it’s harder for readers to comprehend a biological mother doing such a thing.

I believe that the intention was to say that those who cannot love their children to the point of sacrifice are evil witches, deserving death and that a true mother would never do this. This certainly parallels the historical context of the story. And it makes the theme that much more resonant in that it pits the moral against a context in which self-sacrifice was so much more costly than at many other times in history.

The Magic Behind It All

If you look into these and many other older fairy tales, it is readily apparent that these are not necessarily meant for children. Some of the tales are morbid to the point of horror by today’s adult literary standards. Then, why the fairy tale?

If the fairy tale isn’t for children, why not couch the story in plain language and call it what it is: Dark Fiction, or even Horror?

If you’ve read some of my other writing, particularly the post What is Gothic Literature? you know that Gothic literature features those irrational themes – often spiritual or psychological – that can’t be reasoned. They’re less tangible than themes in other genres. There’s a complexity to the questions within the theme that is often mind-boggling.

And that’s where fairy tales play a magical role, because the fairy tale has a way of doing two things:

1. It often introduces supernatural elements – like the witch as proxy for the stepmother in Hansel and Gretel – in order to make the lesson more tangible. This is something I talked about in my article How Gothic Writing Makes the B-Plot Tangible. We don’t just see the stepmother convincing the children’s father to abandon them. We see her reincarnated as a witch in the forest, willing to cook and eat them to save herself. And we see Bluebeard’s blue beard, not as an unnatural physical trait but as a reflection of his ugly character and the dead [and blue] bodies of his former wives.
2. And second, fairy tales boil complex themes down to a child-like story that, beneath the surface, is anything but simple. When the theme is so inherently challenging to understand, the simplicity of the story can make it more digestible to readers.

So, in reality, the fairy tale, is a wonderful medium for Gothic writing. And as C.S. Lewis indicated, once we are mature enough, we will see the truth and value in fairy tales.

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If I had to pick a favorite work of Gothic writing, it would be Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle. Her use of an unreliable narrator, a constant stream of subtext and an immersive setting make this novella one that I could read over and over, never tiring of its complexity and beauty.

So what’s the story about? (Beware! Plot Spoilers Ahead)

We Have Always Lived in the Castle, by Shirley Jackson is a story about a young woman, Mary Katherine “Merricat” who lives a very isolated life with her agoraphobic sister Constance and her dying Uncle Julian. (And of course, Jonas, her cat.) Six years prior, the rest of the family died of arsenic poisoning. Everyone suspected Connie, who had prepared dinner that day, of having murdered them, but the court found her innocent.

Regardless, the villagers still suspect the two girls of murder and use this as rationale for hating and mistreating the two. Merricat, in return, despises all of them. The three live a whimsically odd life until their cousin Charles arrives and threatens to take over the household, control Constance and banish Merricat.

Merricat, who, despite her seeming disassociation from reality, is actually very wise to his schemes, determines to undermine every external threat, including that of Charles.

Merricat: Part Devil, Part Elf

We see a glimpse of our protagonist, Merricat, and her role as an unreliable narrator in the book’s opening statement:

My name is Mary Katherine Blackwood. I am eighteen years old, and I live with my sister Constance. I have often thought that with any luck at all I could have been born a werewolf, because the two middle fingers on both my hands are the same length, but I have had to be content with what I had. I dislike washing myself, and dogs, and noise. I like my sister Constance, and Richard Plantagenet, and Amanita phalloides, the death-cup mushroom. Everyone else in my family is dead.

Nothing Merricat says, regardless of how it seems, is ever random. Here Jackson is telling us a great deal about this character. First, she has a great deal of anger. Her desire to have been born a werewolf – a creature that hunts and kills others with a great degree of invincibility – isn’t strictly an issue of the length of her fingers.

Second, Jackson portrays Merricat as borderline autistic. An eighteen-year-old who hates washing herself and noise is generally on the spectrum, albeit very high-functioning in Merricat’s case. Jackson gives us more evidence of this throughout the book. Merricat rarely makes eye contact with anyone, although she’s able to. She doesn’t like anyone touching her except her sister, and only when she initiates. And she is driven by routine and self-imposed rules and does not like deviating from these.

Third, Merricat lists her fondness for Richard Plantagenet, a man Shakespeare portrayed as having killed several of his family members and a poisonous mushroom (the amanita phalloides death cap mushroom). In these Jackson is both foreshadowing Merricat’s role in her family’s deaths and alluding to Merricat’s sociopathic tendencies. Of course, she is the one who killed the family and has absolutely no remorse for having done so. And she hates everyone other than Connie and maybe her Uncle Julian.

Despite all that, Jackson makes us love her.

Merricat’s voice is hilarious, her perspective is consistently and delightfully off, and she has a fanciful, childlike sense of wonder. She’s obsessed with sympathetic magic – burying items and smashing mirrors in order to try to control the world around her.

In summary, she’s one of the most unique and fascinating characters I’ve ever read. And she’s my favorite protagonist ever. Hands down.

The Opposing Forces

But in the book, there are two principle forces that act against Merricat and Constance: the village (greater and lesser) and their cousin Charles.

Readers are introduced to the greater village – the residents of their New England town – in the very beginning of the story when Merricat goes into the village for groceries and books. Some people are openly mocking, like Jim Donell and the children who taunt her with rhymes about her sister poisoning people. Others are standoffish and quietly hostile, like the grocers and their other customers. Jackson presents a village full of people who have always hated the Blackwood family and who now have a reason – the suspected murder – for openly persecuting Merricat.

Other families – the more affluent ones, like the Clarkes – are sympathetic towards Constance and Mary Katherine. But Jackson presents them as antagonists as well in that they try to persuade the two girls to rejoin society. Merricat, who wants nothing more than to live forever cloistered away in her privacy with only her cat and her sister, views these attempts as a hostile invasion of her fortress.

The second antagonist is their cousin Charles. He comes to visit around the one-third point in the book, and everything goes wrong from that point on. Charles is a greedy man who wants to take their money, take over their home and all of the family’s possessions, and take Constance away from Merricat. He also wants to get rid of Merricat. Whereas Connie is submissive and malleable to his domineering influence, Merricat is not. She is wild, uncontrollable, and likely to thwart everything he does. And he knows it.

Charles makes his intentions clear through several comments. For example, he says to Merricat, “…come a month from now, I wonder who will still be here [living in the house]? You…or me?” Another time he tells her, indirectly, that he knows how to get even with people.

What’s particularly interesting is that Jackson also uses Charles to represents the girls’ dead family, especially their parents. In that respect, Charles is both an antagonist in and of himself, and a representation of the lesser village – the family – as a [former] antagonistic force in the girls’ lives. We’ll get into the lesser village in detail when we discuss the Gothic tropes of repressed memories and ghosts/demons below.

First though, what is Jackson trying to say throughout this story?

The Theme

This story, like others Jackson wrote, features what some have called a “village vs. the individual” theme. It’s a story about the evil of groups of people and their tendency to shun and even persecute those who are not part of their group. This stems from Jackson’s experiences as an outsider living in a small town in New England. She saw this mentality first-hand. Those who were the established families in the town were part of the group. Those who moved into the area, as she did with her husband, were disliked and excluded from the group, the village.

Jackson takes this a step further and presents what we sometimes refer to as mob mentality – the tendency that groups sometimes have to act in ways that the individuals in that group never would on their own. So whereas fifty individuals wouldn’t dream of burning down someone’s house, the collective whole sometimes will. The village becomes something other – and in Jackson’s opinion, vastly more evil – than the individuals themselves.

We see this through Merricat as she senses danger around other people and safety only when she’s alone or with one or two of her preferred family members. The idea is that the village is unsafe and inhospitable. That the individual must separate herself from and, when necessary, act against the village in order to survive.

This is a particularly Gothic theme – an irrational one that’s focused on a psychological and even sociological situation that we can’t explain or even understand. And yet it’s a phenomenon that we can point to and often do witness in human history.

Gothic Tropes

Jackson uses several Gothic tropes to support this theme, and yet she does so in a uniquely subtle way that only she could manage so effectively. We’ll talk about four of them: Isolation, Psychological Instability (Merricat), Repressed Memories (Uncle Julian), and Ghosts/ Demons (Personified in Charles).

Isolation: Clearly isolation ties into the theme – with its idea that the individual must separate herself from the village in order to be safe – the most easily. Both Merricat and Constance self-isolate, Merricat out of disdain for the village and Constance out of fear. But their isolation is often threatened. Well-meaning neighbors and their cousin Charles attempt to, and nearly do, persuade Connie to leave the house and rejoin society. What Merricat sees that Connie doesn’t, is that to do so would open themselves up to danger. She understands that the villagers and Charles cannot be trusted.

Jackson juxtaposes the character of the two girls as if they are two opposing types of individuals. Constance is the submissive, gentle, selfless, serving sister. She’s always cleaning, cooking, and caring for someone else. And she’s the one who is the most vulnerable to attack. She’s the one who is almost taken in by Charles’s schemes. Constance is the example of an individual who doesn’t fight against the village and is nearly destroyed by it.

In contrast, Merricat is the wild, vindictive, remorseless sister. She’s the one who sees people most truly, calls things like they are, and is the most capable at defending their fortress. Though her final actions in the story seem destructive on the surface, it’s actually Merricat who seals up their castle and eliminates all external threats from their lives. It’s Merricat who secures the perpetual service of the villagers. She is the example of the individual who fights against the village and prevails.

Psychological Instability: Merricat is unstable. She’s an unreliable narrator, and Jackson uses her brilliantly. This is the kind of story you can read over and over again and still delight in the nuance or even catch something new. Every word in the book means something. So if you see Merricat saying something that seems random, or nonsensical, I would recommend that you stop and question it. For example, consider the following brief conversation between Merricat and Constance:

 “…Today my winged horse is coming and I am carrying you off to the moon and on the moon we will eat rose petals.”

“Some rose petals are poisonous.”

“Not on the moon. Is it true that you can plant a leaf?”

“Some leaves. Furred leaves. You can put them in water and they grow roots and then you plant them and they grow into a plant. The kind of plant they were when they started, of course, not just any plant.”

“I’m sorry about that…I like a leaf that grows into a different plant…”

It would be really easy to grace over this section, chalk it up to nothing more than Merricat’s very fanciful imagination, and move on. With a lesser writer, that might be just as well. With Jackson, we would be missing something.

So what is she telling us here?

Well, for one, we see foreshadowing. Here Merricat alludes to something that might be poisonous to eat – rose petals – but that where she wants to take Constance, they will be safe to eat. So Merricat is subtly saying that she very carefully poisoned the family in such a way that ensured Constance would be safe. This comes to light later, but here it is foreshadowed.

For another, in her comments about planting leaves, Merricat (and Jackson) tells us something about people. When a leaf is cut off from its plant, it can sometimes grow into another plant. But Constance says it’ll be the same kind of plant it was originally. Merricat is sad about that.

What she’s saying here is that you can cut someone off from their plant (their group) and they can still grow and thrive, but they’ll never be any different. They’ll still be like the group they were once a part of. The idea is that those who belong to the village – even if they’re removed from it – will at some point re-form a new village like the prior one. And that village will always oppose the individual.

This is just one example among many in which Jackson uses Merricat’s very unstable and strange psychological state to slip in a constant stream of subtext that gives meaning to the book. And, more to our point here, she uses Merricat as an example of someone who seems most culpable of evil, to point to those who, though they appear to be socially acceptable, are in fact more evil than she is.

Repressed Memories: Uncle Julian is an interesting character study. Jackson uses his shaky mental state – a result of having consumed a small amount of the arsenic – to point to the truth of the Blackwood family and to give Merricat a motive.

Uncle Julian spends the entire novella compiling his notes on what happened six years ago, the day the rest of the family died. He pores over minute details like what each person wore, where they sat at the table, what they had said or done earlier in the day, and yet, even though he was there and withnessed it all, he can’t discover what has happened.

Why?

Jackson tells us on page 93. Uncle Julian states that Mary Katherine died during the trial after that fateful day. It’s only in retrospect that we realize that he has never spoken to Merricat, or looked at her, throughout the entire story. This is crucial to the theme. Julian’s mind is not sound, but he’s present enough to communicate on a seemingly rational level. He must have known that she poisoned the family. However, Julian has repressed this memory by convincing himself that she died and that “she did not survive the loss of her family.”

Was Merricat bereaved after their deaths? No, of course not. She’s anything but.

By using Julian’s repressed memories, Jackson makes a subtle connection with the readers. Essentially, Julian shows us that though Merricat is guilty, her actions were justified. Some part of Julian knows what she did and yet, no matter how he examines the evidence, he can’t find her guilty. Why?

We find the answer if we examine all of Julian’s comments. There we see a picture of the Blackwood family.

Julian says that his brother John, Merricat’s father, never begrudged them their food as long as they ate very sparingly. And Uncle Julian, who confuses Charles with his dead brother, John, tells us that Charles, like John, is greedy, consumed with money and material goods, and dishonest. This is how Jackson gives readers a glimpse into Merricat’s motive for murdering them. The entire family was cold and cruel to her, to Uncle Julian and most likely also to Constance. In return, Merricat poisoned them.

Uncle Julian, who knows how terrible his brother was, and how cruel the family could be, understands why Merricat did so. He understands the theme even though he refuses to admit it.

Ghosts/Demons: The ghost in this story is Charles. Merricat says that he looks like her father, that he’s a ghost, a demon. Even Uncle Julian – who confuses Charles with his brother – begins calling him “John.”

Through Charles as the demon or ghost of the family, Jackson gives us a first-hand view of the lesser village – the Blackwood family – and how it acted against Merricat. When Charles comes, it’s as if the family is resurrected from the dead. Through him, the manipulative and selfish abusiveness of their family returns to the house. If Charles had been left to his devices, he would have ensnared Constance, taken all of their material possessions and thrown Merricat and Uncle Julian out of the house.

But, Merricat won’t tolerate it. Her actions escalate as she attempts to exorcise him from her house and her life. Through Charles, we see why the village is a threat to the individual and why the individual must both separate herself from and act against it.

Is The Book Gothic?

I’d definitely call this book Gothic. Jackson’s theme is a psychological one that can’t be reasoned. We know that the tendencies groups have towards exclusion or even a mob mentality is true. And yet, it can’t be studied empirically, or proven in any way. That makes it a Gothic theme.

And Jackson uses her tropes very effectively to exemplify this theme. She does this better than almost any writer. What’s so interesting about Jackson is that her tropes tend to be very subtle. She doesn’t use vampires or stormy weather or some of the more overt gothic tropes. Rather, she uses Gothic tropes more symbolically – like the ghost of the family, represented by Charles – and with a light hand.

Lastly, Jackson brings a distinctly unsettling mood to her books through characters and/or environments that are off just enough as to be disorienting to the reader. We’ll talk about The Haunting of Hill House at some point, because that’s another deep dive into a character’s psychological underpinnings. In that case, she uses the environment – the house – to create this impression. But this unsettling mood has the effect of leaving the reader off balance just enough to be impressionable and open to the theme.

We could go on for hours about this little novella and look at things like why Constance repeatedly says that everything that Merricat does is her fault, but I’ll leave that for you to think about as you read or re-read the book. Let me know what you think about this and anything else we’ve discussed in the comments below!

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I wrote the title of this post and cringed a little because, for much of history, people have held to the legend of vampires. So much so that they’ve become part of our narrative. To say that vampires are a myth is almost to sever a piece of our own identity. But, when did this happen, this merger of man and other? And what is the appeal?

That’s what we’re going to touch on today.

Last Friday I released a video on my YouTube channel, in which we talked about the ways that vampires are used to enhance Gothic themes. We looked at a couple of examples: Dracula by Bram Stoker and The Interview with the Vampire by Anne Rice. And then we talked about other ways that vampires could mirror the types of irrational themes that we work with in Gothic literature. If you’re looking for it, you can find it here.

In keeping with this week’s theme of vampires, I thought I’d dig into some of the history of vampires. Not just the one we all know, but the stories from around the world in which blood-thirsty creatures – man or demon – came to life in Egypt, Greece or India.

Most vampire lovers know that much of the modern perspective of vampires stems from Bram Stoker’s Dracula, a book which many attribute to the historical figure of Count Vlad Tepeš, a man referred to as Vlad the Impaler. He was a hero of the Romanian people, waging war on the Ottomans. The nickname came from his tendency to impale those he took captive.

But vampire legends began long before Count Vlad or Bram Stoker.

Ancient Evidence of Vampire Lore

Some think that the vampire originated in ancient Egypt. Matthew Beresford, who wrote the book From Demons to Dracula: The Creation of the Modern Vampire Myth, wrote that there is evidence that vampires came into being in ancient Egypt when someone summoned a demon into our world. If you’ve ever read Anne Rice’s Queen of the Damned, you’ll recognize this legend as consistent with her vampire history.

Further support for the Egyptian origin of vampires resides in the Egyptian goddess Sekhmet, the cat-faced goddess of war. She drank blood in such abundance that the Egyptian people feared that once wars ceased, she would turn from a warring ally to blood-thirsty enemy. In an attempt to stave off that event, they took to holding a festival at the end of every war in order to signal to her that the blood binge was to cease.¹

Other ancient cultures also show evidence of vampires. Pottery shards excavated from ancient Persia depict creatures drinking human blood². The Sumerians and Babylonians told similar legends of the demon-goddess Lilith who they claim was Adam’s first wife and refused to submit to his leadership. Instead, she left him and roamed the land, preying on pregnant women and drinking the blood of infants.³

A family purported to be descendants of the Oracles of Delphi tells a story of Ambrogio, an Italian man who came to Greece and met Selene, one of the maidens of the temple of Apollo. He fell in love with the young woman, incurring the wrath of Apollo. The sun god, who wanted Selene for himself, cursed the man by making him unable to bear sunlight. Ultimately Ambrogio won over the goddess Artemis who gifted Selene and himself with immortality. This immortality was passed to another through drinking the person’s blood.⁴

Hindu folklore tells the story of a vampire, Vetala. What’s most interesting is that Bram Stoker’s family lived in colonial India where he grew interested in Indian occult traditions. Sir Richard Burton, the British explorer who was also in India at the time translating these tales from Sanskrit into English, spoke of having discussed these with Stoker.⁵ So it’s just as likely that Stoker took his inspiration from India than that he extrapolated from the tales of Vlad the Impaler.

We could go on, listing stories from China and Europe and elsewhere, in which blood-drinking creatures have played a dominant role. But why do we, as humans, have such a long-standing obsession with these creatures?

The Eternal Appeal of the Vampire

Stories of vampires have grown in popularity in the modern era with movies like Twilight, and T.V. shows like The Vampire Diaries and True Blood.

If you look at some of the earlier tales of vampires, the tone is one of warning. Sekhmet, for all her benefits in battle, was a deity to be appeased and avoided. Lilith and Vetala were cautionary tales. People in medieval Europe used vampire legends to explain plagues and other pandemics. Even Bram Stoker’s Dracula was a creature to be feared and destroyed. But today, vampirism is glamorized, romanticized to the extent that whole sub-cultures exist in which people who identify as vampires can drink blood or feed off of the energy of others’ souls, albeit generally with the consent of the other party.

With respect to historical references – those of the cautionary type – the vampire seems to explain those things that are so hard for people to understand. Things like the blood-shed on the battlefield, the miscarriages and infant deaths that plagued much of history, and the outbreaks of disease that run rampant through society at different times. In those cases, Sekhmet, Lilith and the unnamed vampires of medieval Europe, come in handy. They assign blame to those circumstances in which we humans find ourselves powerless.

When it comes to the modern era’s obsession with the romanticized vampire, I attribute that to a post-modern society in which humans exert less effort to survive than they have in prior eras and therefore have more time for self-romanticizing. An era in which humans have assumed an ascendant view of themselves as little gods.

Vampires are essentially the darker cousin of our Marvel superheroes. The immortal, quasi-all-powerful beings who exist for their own benefit and who gift whomever they choose with their benevolence. Iron Man and Batman choose to war and pursue justice on behalf of mankind when and if they please. Modern vampires like Damon and Stefan and Elena of the Vampire Diaries sometimes slaughter and gift people with healing indiscriminately, vacillating between monster and mage.

They can’t be controlled. They give what they choose, when they choose to give it. They exist above humanity, on a transcendent plane of immortality and super-human strength and heightened sensory abilities. They are the human version of modern gods.

So, in truth, the vampire has simply come full-circle, from Sekhmet to the modern day. The only difference is that in prior eras, we held vampires apart from ourselves as something of a capricious god whom we needed to appease and/or avoid. Today, modern humanity attempts to take this godhood for itself, refusing to submit to any external entity.

Conclusion

Regardless of whether one holds the historical perspective – of vampires as an explanation for those inexplicable times of suffering and loss – or a modern perspective in which we seek the immortality and power for ourselves, the vampire speaks to all of the tendencies of the human heart.

Because of that, the vampire will always exist, whether in myth or mainstream culture.

¹ Taylor, A. (2017, August 24). Meet Sekhmet, The Ancient Egyptian Cat Goddess And Possibly The World’s First Vampire. Retrieved from https://www.ranker.com/list/goddess-sekhmet-first-vampire/april-a-taylor

² Marigny, Vampires, p. 14.

³ Gaines, J.H. (2021, April 14). Lilith: Seductress, Heroine or Murderer? Retrieved from https://www.biblicalarchaeology.org/daily/people-cultures-in-the-bible/people-in-the-bible/lilith/

⁴ Belmont, M. The Scriptures of Delphi. Retrieved from https://www.gods-and-monsters.com/scriptures-of-delphi.html. And The Vampire Origin Story. Retrieved from https://www.gods-and-monsters.com/vampire-origin.html.

⁵ Sen, A. and Sharma, A. (2018, January 21). Meet Dracula’s Indian Ancestor Vetala. Retrieved from https://www.thehindu.com/society/meet-draculas-indian-ancestor-vetala/article22479854.ece

I recently released a YouTube video entitled Terror vs. Horror. In it, I discussed the differences between the two and when, as a writer, you would want to use one or the other. For this post, I thought I’d take a related but somewhat different look at the lasting allure of terror in literature.

Keep in mind that I’m not talking about the horror of chainsaw movies or the known threats within every thriller novel and movie you’ve ever seen, although those have enduring appeal as well. For this post, I’m going to stick exclusively to terror – that unseen dread that speaks of more than what manifests on the surface.

Because in the end, the two – terror vs. horror – appeal to us for very different reasons.

As a reminder, terror is defined as the dread your character feels in response to something that strikes a very individual chord with the character. If your character comes home from work to find a silk scarf on the kitchen table, that’s not necessarily frightening to any other character. But if the scarf was her mother’s and was buried with her thirteen years prior, the sight of it will certainly strike a sense of dread and unease in the character (and in the readers who also understand this association).

Gothic novels have used terror since day one because terror parallels Gothic themes so closely – themes that delve into the spiritual and/or psychological depths of the characters.

But why do we – the readers – love terror so much? Why do we seek out and gleefully anticipate the effect that the terror will have on us? I can think of three possible reasons.

Terror Confirms That the Unseen is Real

Terror almost always introduces some element of the supernatural. By that I don’t necessarily mean demons or angels or other unseen beings that we associate with our religions. It may just be a sense, a pervasive thread throughout the work, that there is more that exists than what can be seen. And that that truth lies beyond the surface of the tangible world.

Just writing that reminds me of the Upside Down in Stranger Things. If you love Gothic TV shows (and the 80s), check out Stranger Things on Netflix. In the show, the Upside Down is an alternate dimension that appears identical to, albeit darker than, the real world except that the evil is visible. In the real world this evil is hidden beneath the sunlight and schedules of everyday life. It’s easy to ignore, or overtly denounce its existence. But places like the Upside Down don’t allow for that. The evil is too apparent to dismiss.

This mirrors many spiritual beliefs, including Judeo-Christian ones, that teach that there is a spiritual world beyond what our senses perceive. And that the spiritual world is vastly larger and more complex than ours is. Regardless of what beliefs you hold, most people believe that there is something more to this world.

Terror points to that and declares that it is true by consistently focusing on the unseen and reflecting that, whether it’s a spiritual or a psychological phenomenon, it is a real and influential factor in our lives.

Terror Speaks to the Depths of the Human Soul

Often these factors focus us inward. In the Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson, the author delves into the depths of the human soul and examines the two sides to a person – the one that longs for goodness and the other that longs for evil. He puts forth the idea that both sides can’t coexist and that the evil side will always win out.

Shirley Jackson examines a slightly different scenario in her writing. For example, consider her novella We Have Always Lived in The Castle, in which she explores the role of the community against the individual. We could think about this from a sociological standpoint, but I believe that it boils down to a psychological matter. What happens to a person’s capacity for evil when he or she is part of the collective? Does one’s identity within a group enhance each individual’s tendency to ostracize and persecute those who aren’t in the group?

The terror that these authors use points to the fact that the human soul is something more than merely our personality or the shell of our material bodies.

Terror Forces Us to Examine Ourselves

All of this has a tendency to focus our attention on ourselves. Hopefully not in a self-centered way. But in the sense that it forces us to consider the things about ourselves that we might otherwise want to overlook or deny.

If you’ve ever read Edgar Allan Poe’s story The Tell-Tale Heart, Poe uses the reference of a murder victim’s purportedly beating heart to point to the true problem: the main character’s heart. It’s his guilty conscience that’s really calling to him, reminding him of what he has done and who he is. Forcing him to confront the things he’s attempted to bury.

To illustrate this, consider if, in contrast, the authors were to use horror. In the presence of an external, tangible threat, how much easier would it be to overlook all of the things we’ve just mentioned? It would be natural. But terror, by focusing on the unseen and the dread that certain associations cause within us, forces to face those things that lie beneath the surface.

It does this by asking why? Why is Dr. Jekyll unable to escape from Mr. Hyde? Why is Merricat (in We Have Always Lived in The Castle) constantly at odds with the villagers? And why is the unnamed narrator in The Tell-Tale Heart haunted by the beating of the heart?

Terror focuses the readers beyond the terror itself to the source of the terror: the characters themselves. And by extension, ourselves.

That quality will always make terror relevant because it speaks to the depths of our human condition. Who we are and why we act the way we do.